With steeply rising disposable incomes and savings rates that approach – and in some cases exceed – 35% a year, it isn’t difficult to see why the China auto market is zooming along. But what may be tough for U.S. consumers to picture – especially as they deal with rising unemployment and a nagging economic malaise – is the intensity with which domestic demand is growing here in China.

Autos are more than just transportation here. They’re a symbol of wealth and success – a sexy status symbol. One’s social position can be determined by the type of vehicle one owns and flaunts.

This isn’t the first time we’ve detailed the promise of the China auto market. Nor is it the first time we’ve talked about the “Chuppies” (Chinese Yuppies), the demographic group China will rely on as the nation attempts to decrease its reliance on exports and become more of a consumer-driven economy.

Investors, economists and other “experts” on China are finally becoming attuned to this economic transition. But what those observers don’t realize is that the story doesn’t stop there. China isn’t just evolving into a consumer economy. As auto sales demonstrate, China is becoming a “complete” economy, in which such key ingredients as consumer spending, domestic business investment and foreign investment are each increasingly playing their required role.

Take business spending. The auto has become an important business tool: It’s believed that having your customers see an impressive car conveys confidence and helps build trust with the government. That kind of thinking is very Western in focus. What’s different here, however, is that cars are also believed to be a key contributor to the concept of “face,” which is ever so important here.

Huang Jin, a native Beijinger and longtime friend, explained it this way: “If you drive a late-1980s-model Japanese car, people will not want to do business with you. Your car suggests how much you are worth and, by implication, whether you are worth doing business with.”

He drives an Audi A8 that’s jet black, with all the trimmings. [Given his objective, the A8 was apparently an excellent choice. Its U.S. marketing tagline says that "(even) motionless, it still commands respect."]

Another friend of mine, Luo Xin, puts a different spin on things. The way he sees it, the car he drives makes a statement about who he is – which is why he craves the sporty, futuristic proto-types that were all over the Shanghai exhibiting center this week as part of the Auto Shanghai 2009 auto show.

“Why not dream?” he says. “The new stuff suggests that I’m hip and gives prospective wives the image that I am successful, enjoy my life and think about the future.”

Julian Hardy, who serves as general manager for Aston Martin China, recently told the China Daily newspaper that China’s mega-rich may have lost 1 billion yuan (about  $146 million), but adds that they’ve “still got 5 billion ($730 million) left.”

Aston Martin, long the preferred ride of fabled super spy James Bond, sold 50 cars here last year and sales may hit 150 within the next 12 months. It’s a similar story with Lexus. The company’s newest Shanghai store has already sold 20 cars since opening in mid April. And Ferrari, BMW (Bayerische Motoren Werke AG), Porsche (Porsche Automobile Holding SE), and any of a half dozen other high-end brands are finding a market among China’s emerging consumer class.
China recorded 15 billionaires last year, as well as several hundred thousand millionaires, so this is not a trend that’s going away anytime soon.

At the other end of the spectrum, low-end cars continue to move at record pace, too. Last year, we told readers that General Motors Corp.’s (GM) Buick line, Ford Motor Co. (F) and Volkswagen AG (OTC ADR: VLKAY) produce the lion’s share of the small, sporty and fuel-efficient models sold here. At the time, I suggested that it wouldn’t be long before Chinese automaker’s like Geely Automobile Holdings Ltd., Red Flag (or Hong Qi, as it’s known to its China customers), and BYD Co. Ltd., have come up to speed.

In fact, the MidAmerican Energy Holding Co., which is roughly 88% owned by the Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK.A, BRK.B) investment vehicle run by U.S. stock-market icon Warren Buffett, announced in October that it would pay roughly $230 million for a 10% stake in BYD, which makes cars and specialized batteries.

I originally thought it might take as long as 24 months for China’s domestic automakers to really get traction, but somehow I have not been surprised to see how quickly the markets have evolved to accommodate utilitarian cars that are “basic transportation” in words only. Why Detroit can’t do this is beyond me; the so-called  “Big Three” would be wise to take an extended field trip over here to learn how to get back into the ballgame.

A few years ago, I suggested that China would overtake the United States as the world’s largest car market. Now China’s done it not once, but for the last three months in a row, with sales reaching a record 1.1 million. Incidentally, at the same time I made that prediction, I also suggested that one or more of China’s automakers would enter the U.S. market. Now it’s all but a foregone conclusion. So stay tuned.

When it comes to cars – or to any other product or commodity for that matter – China’s newly moneyed class is not going away anytime soon. The estimated 330 million people in this country’s broad middle class continue to amass economic purchasing power at a rate that will exceed the capability of their counterparts in the U.S., Japanese and Eurozone markets combined during the next 12 months.

The bottom line: Investments focused on the ambition of China’s emerging consumer class may prove to be some of the best available in the coming post-financial-crash environment.

Chinese iron-ore demand creates money-making opportunity for one company… and a few lucky investors…

Reconstruction of earthquake damage in Sichuan is shooting the demand for iron ore higher than the total supply in China right now. The country is importing like never before, and using this dry bulk shipper to get the materials there. This company is super cheap by all value measurements, and is poised for a double. See how you can profit by clicking here.

Source: While the Rest of the World is Stuck in Reverse, the China Auto Market Zooms Ahead

[Editor's Note: Money Morning Investment Director Keith Fitz-Gerald is one of the world's leading experts on Asia, especially China. Right now, Fitz-Gerald is leading an investment tour of the Red Dragon, and he'll be sending along regular investment travelogues to update Money Morning readers on his latest observations. This is the second installment of that series.]

The manure began accumulating when we rode up to the high pasture on Tuesday. More about that below…

In the meantime, the Dow rallied a bit yesterday – up 127 points…barely half of what it lost on Monday.
Is the bounce still bouncing? We don’t know. But we don’t trust it. They say the stock market ‘looks ahead.’ So, it is possible for it to see things we can’t see. On the other hand, what was it looking at two years ago? Didn’t it see the economy going over a cliff? Apparently not.

But investors tend to believe what they want to believe. And what they want to believe is that the stock market has had its vision corrected and now sees a recovery.

Our guess is that they are wrong on both scores. The stock market is just as blind now as it was in early 2007…and there is no recovery coming any time soon. As to the first point, we have no further evidence to present…but as to the second; at least we have a theory.

By our reckoning, this is not a recession…this is a depression. In a recession, the bull market formula still works. It just needs a little time to rest…catch its breath…work off inventories…and rebuild cash accounts. But in a depression, the formula stops working.

The basic formula that drove the U.S. economy for the last 60 years has been the expansion of consumer spending. At first, that spending was healthy spending. People had built up savings during the war. In the Eisenhower years, they were ready to get back to work in the consumer economy, get married, have children, and spend money. America was the world’s leading lender…leading exporter…leading manufacturer…and leading everything. Gradually though, having so many advantages caught up to the United States of America. By the ’70s, the Nixon administration thought it could do away with the gold backing for the currency. By the ’80s, the United States slipped from being a net creditor to being a net debtor to the rest of the world. By the ’90s, American consumers were spending more than they made…and by the ’00s they had given up saving all together – depending on the savings of poor people in China and elsewhere in order to continue living beyond their means.

Each time this system was faced with a recessionary correction, at least in the last 25 years, the feds tried to stimulate consumer spending with easier credit. And each time, consumers took the bait and got hooked on more debt. That’s why the financial industry expanded so much…it sold more and more debt in more and more grotesque and amazing ways.

This time is different. This time the feds have responded with zero interest rates…and $13 trillion worth of bailouts and boondoggles. But the old magic doesn’t seem to work anymore. This time, the formula no longer works. Consumers already have too much stuff – and no way to pay for it all. They have no choice; they have to cut back. This is not a pause in the long cycle of increasing consumption, debt and speculation. It is a reversal of the cycle – with less consumption and less debt (more savings). This is a depression.

If left alone, this cycle will see falling asset prices, falling bond prices and rising savings for many years. Stocks should sell down to levels where they are attractive again – at average P/Es below 8…7…or even 6. And with dividend yields above 5%.

Of course, when that happens people will have lost interest in stocks. The financial magazines will have pronounced the stock market “dead” and Jim Cramer will have been booted off the air.

By that time, the economy will have been restructured too. There will be less retail space. Many malls will have gone broke. Living standards in America and Britain will have gone down. And many of the people in the financial industry will be doing what they ought to have been doing all along – taking lunch counter orders.

Now, we turn to Addison for news on the global financial losses:

“Banks, brokerages, fund managers…you name the financial firm…they’ve now seen nearly $4.1 trillion in digits evaporate since the beginning of the credit crunch, says the International Monetary Fund (IMF) this morning.”

“More than half the losses – $2.7 trillion – were sustained by U.S. firms,” explains Addison in today’s issue of The 5 Min. Forecast.

“So far, global financial losses in this bust are almost equal to the entire market cap crunch of the tech bust early in the century:

“In an effort to paper over the losses abroad, the IMF has already funded over $55 billion in emergency loans to European nations including Hungary, Serbia, Romania, Iceland, Ukraine, Belarus and Latvia.

“Last week, Mexico became the first Latin American country to put up the white flag, asking for a $47 billion line of credit. Just yesterday, Columbia followed suit, seeking $10.4 billion. We’ll go out on a limb here… they won’t be the last.”

Each weekday, Addison brings readers the The 5 Min Forecast, an executive series e-letter that provides a quick and dirty analysis of daily economic and financial developments – in five minutes or less.

And back to Bill, with more thoughts:

Compuel is a huge valley…probably about 10,000 acres…above 3,000 meters in altitude. There are no trees. And a cold wind blows through the sage even in summer. This time of year, at least it is green.

The summer rains came late this year. A river runs through the center of the valley, wide and shallow…you can splash through it on horseback. For a few months of the year, it turns the center of the valley into wetlands. Later, in the winter months, it will be dry as Death Valley and as cold as a tax collector’s heart. But last week it was wet and marshy…with ducks flapping up suddenly wherever you go.

You can get to Compuel in a 4×4…but it is an almost impossible drive…not to mention dangerous. There are sections of the road that are hardly as wide as the wheelbase…with a 1,000 ft drop off the edge.

“It was probably an old Inca or pre-Inca trail,” explained Veronica. She was one of three archeologists who showed up at the house on Saturday. They asked if they could camp out and do some digging in the Indian ruins on the ranch.

“We won’t take anything. Besides, the law requires that anything we find belongs to the state,” she anticipated our questions.

“This area is very rich in archeological evidence,” Veronica continued. She was from Buenos Aires, a cheerful, talkative woman with a librarian’s air about her. With her was Paola…another archeologist from Buenos Aires …and Hector…an archeologist from Salta. They were trying to figure out dates.

“We don’t really know much about the Indians who were here before the Inca,” Veronica went on. “All we know is that they were brave and independent. This tribe resisted the Inca…and the Spanish. The Incas tried to subjugate them…forcing them to pay tribute. But they fought them off. I guess they figured that if they could beat the Incas they could also beat the Spanish. In fact, they were the last Indians in all of Argentina to surrender. And the story is that women took their babies up into what they call the ‘fortress’ – a natural stone formation – and threw them onto the rocks down below rather than see them enslaved by the conquistadors.

“But we don’t know much more than that. So we dig down to try to find bits of pottery…and seeds…and soil samples that will tell us what they ate and which groups of other tribes they were related to. Then, we put the pieces together and gradually develop a better picture of who they were and how they lived.

“That’s why we need to go to the ruins at Compuel.”

“How are you going to get there?” asked Jorge, the farm manager.

“We’re going to hike. What do you think…can we get there in 4 hours or so?”

“Ha…ha… it will take you at least 7 hours… depending on how strong you are. And of course, you will need a pack mule to carry your equipment.”

On horseback, you can get to Compuel from the ranch house in 4 hours. The trail is rugged…with the horses stepping from stone to stone in some areas. By the time we got there we were already tired and saddle-sore. When we arrived, the roundup had already begun. The vaqueros – our local cowboys – had already rounded up the cattle from the whole valley and driven them into a big stone corral. They were roping the calves and separating the bulls from the cows. Occasionally, a bull would charge…but the cowboys were fast, they dashed to the side and jumped up onto the stonewall. Their dogs stood on top of the stonewall watching attentively. This was a once-a-year spectacle they didn’t want to miss.

Source:  Is the Bounce Still Bouncing?

I maintain that there are countless constructive tasks waiting to occupy us on a long national “to do” list for rebuilding a national economy, but they are way different than the ones currently preoccupying government and the mainstream media. The Obama White House, Congress, and The New York Times are hung up on exercises in futility — “rescuing” banks and insurance companies that cannot be rescued (because they are hopelessly trapped in “black hole” credit default swaps contracts), and re-starting a “consumer” binge that was completely crazy in the first place, based, as it was, on a something-for-nothing standard-of-living.

Meanwhile, if the buzz on the blogosphere is a measure of anything — and I think it is — then a new consensus is forming out there about where to start doing things differently. Unfortunately after less than two months in office, President Obama finds himself awkwardly behind-the-curve on this. It begins with the understanding that a general bank rescue is hopeless and, going a step further, that the people who caused the train wreck of “innovative” securities have to be prosecuted. The public’s collective voice on this is muted but growing. It has been muted by the general air of blackmail that the banks have used to enthrall policy and opinion — the “too big to fail” idea — in effect holding the nation’s future for ransom.

Last week, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo hauled Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) chief Ken Lewis into his office to explain who, exactly, received an aggregate several billion dollars in bonuses late in 2008 after the US Treasury forked over billions of dollars in TARP money to his bank. That was a good start. Mr. Lewis, being lawyered-up to the max, had the temerity to reply that answering the question would compromise his ability to keep talented people in his employ. For that impertinence alone, Mr. Lewis ought to be dragged over fifteen miles of broken chardonnay bottles behind a GMC Yukon — but that is not how we do things in American jurisprudence. To be more realistic, a simple indictment would be in order, and then Mr. Lewis can answer this question, and a few others, in the comfort of an air-conditioned courtroom. Ultimately, that might lead to Mr. Lewis becoming the wife of a bodybuilder in one of New York State’s houses of correction — a just outcome that would go far in rejiggering the nation’s expectations about how people in authority ought to behave. And such an outcome might lead to the conviction of many other brides-to-be from the Wall Street debutante pool.

Now it has come to light, just last week in the wake of AIG’s latest bail-out, that previous AIG bail-out money to the tune of $50 billion was distributed to a set of banks including Goldman Sachs (former employer of then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and then New York Federal Reserve Governor Tim Geithner), plus Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS), Merrill Lynch, Mr. Lewis’s Bank of America, and a long list of European banks with operations in the USA. Since the transactions took place in New York State, the investigation of these irregularities alone could solve the unemployment problem here if NY Attorney General Cuomo were given a free hand in hiring staff to depose everyone involved — including the hiring of caterers to bring in coffee and meals for round-the-clock proceedings.

All of this raises another awkward question: where is United States Attorney General Eric Holder in this situation? Surely the federal statutes offer some grounds for inquiring about the misuse of Treasury funds — and many other issues arising from Wall Street’s stupendous orgy of misbehavior. What I’m hearing out in the blogosphere is a growing clamor to call people to account before we are really able to move on to the massive task-list that awaits us in rebuilding our economy.

The bigger question for now is whether any of these authorities will act effectively before the public simply goes apeshit and starts burning down Greenwich, Connecticut. The dangerous shift in public mood is liable to occur with shocking swiftness, in the manner of “phase change,” where one moment you see a bewildered bunch of flabby clown-citizens vacuously enraptured by “American Idol,” and the next moment they are transformed into a vicious mob hoisting flaming brands to the window treatments of a hedge funder’s McMansion. The moment of opportunity for avoiding that outcome is looking sickeningly slim right now.

Another thing that President Obama can set into motion anytime — and pull himself back to the head of the curve of leadership — is to either by executive order or by proposal to congress, shut down the credit default swap system for a period of time while procedures are drawn up to place all these dubious contracts in a “clearing” market, where the holders of them will have to come clean about what they’re sitting on. The lack of this procedure is allowing zombie banks to hold the United States hostage for never-ending bailout ransoms. None of these banks are going to survive another six months anyway, so the basic blackmail motif that the whole money system will collapse if ransoms are not paid is a bluff that has to be called sooner or later in any case. So Mr. Obama might as well get on with it.

Once these two matters are dealt with — an earnest start-up of prosecutions and disabling the credit default swap blackmail racket — then perhaps a stressed-out and impoverished public might be induced to not go apeshit and instead get on with the mighty task of rebuilding our nation along lines that have a plausible future.

Source: The Consumer Economy Isn’t Coming Back

This from Whiskey & Gunpowder:

Though Citicorp (NYSE:C) is deemed too big to fail, it’s hardly reassuring to know that it’s been allowed to sink its fangs into the Mother Zombie that the U.S. Treasury has become and sucked out a multi-billion dollar dose of embalming fluid so it can go on pretending to be a bank for a while longer.

I employ this somewhat clunky metaphor to point out that the U.S. Government is no more solvent than the financial zombies it is keeping on walking-dead support. And so this serial mummery of weekend bailout schemes is as much of a fraud and a swindle as the algorithm-derived-securities shenanigans that induced the disease of bank zombification in the first place. The main question it raises is whether, eventually, the creation of evermore zombified U.S. dollars will exceed the amount of previously-created U.S. dollars now vanishing into oblivion through compressive debt deflation.

My guess, given the usual time-lag factor, is that the super-inflation snap-back will occur six to eighteen months from now. And the main result of all this will be our inability to buy the imported oil that comprises two-thirds of the oil we require to keep Wal-Mart and Walt Disney World running. At some point, then, in the early months of the Obama administration, we’ll learn that “change” is not a set of mere lifestyle choices but a wrenching transition away from all our familiar and comfortable habits into a stark and rigorous new economic landscape.

The credit economy is dead and the dead credit residue of that dead economy is going where dead things go. It came into the world as “money” and it is going out of this world as a death-dealing disease, and we’re not going to get over this disease until we stop generating additional zombie money out of no productive activity whatsoever. The campaign to sustain the unsustainable is, besides war, the greatest pitfall this society can stumble into. It represents a squandering of our remaining scant resources and can only produce the kind of extreme political disappointment that wrecks nations and leads to major conflicts between them. I don’t know how much Mr. Obama buys into the current adopt-a-zombie program — his Treasury designee Timothy Geithner was apparently in on this weekend’s Citicorp deal — but the President would be wise to steer clear of whatever the walking dead in the Bush corner are still up to.

All the activities based on getting something-for-nothing are dead or dying now, in particular buying houses and cars on credit and so it should not be a surprise that the two major victims are the housing and car industries. Notice, by the way, that these are the two major ingredients of an economy based on building suburban sprawl. That’s over, too. We’re done building it and the stuff we’ve already built is destined to lose both money value and usefulness as the wrenching transition goes forward.

All this obviously begs the question: what kind of economy are we going to live in if the old one is toast? Well, it’s also pretty obvious that it will have to be based on activities productively aimed at keeping human beings alive in an ecology that has a future. Once you grasp this, you will see that there is no reason to despair and more than enough for all of us to do, so we can recover from the zombie nation disease and get on with the next chapter of American history — and I sure hope that Mr. Obama will get with the new program.

To be specific about this new economy, we’re going to have to make things again, and raise things out of the earth, locally, and trade these things for money of some kind that we earn through our own productive activities. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is optional. The only other option is to go through a violent sociopolitical convulsion. We ought to know from prior examples in world history that this is not a desirable experience. So, to avoid that, we really have to put our shoulders to the wheel and get to work on things that matter, and do it at a scale that is consistent with what the world really has to offer right now, especially in terms of available energy.

In my view — and I know this is controversial — a much larger proportion of the U.S. population will have to be employed in growing the food we eat. There are many ways of arranging this, some more fair than others, and I hope the better angels of our nature steer us in the direction of fairness and justice. The prospects of a devalued dollar imply that we very shortly will not be able to get the all the oil-and-gas based “inputs” that have made petro-agriculture possible the past century. The consequences of this are so unthinkable that we have not been thinking about it. And, of course, the further implications of current land-use allocation, and the property ownership issues entailed, suggests formidable difficulties in re-arranging the farming sector. The sooner we face all this, the better.

As the fiesta of “globalism” (Tom Friedman-style) draws to a close — another consequence of currency problems — we’ll have to figure out how to make things in this country again. We will not be manufacturing things at the scale, or in the manner, we were used to in, say, 1962. We’ll have to do it far more modestly, using much more meager amounts of energy than we did in the past.

My guess is that we will get the electricity for doing this mostly from water. It may actually be too late — from a remaining capital resources point-of-view — to ramp up a new phase of the nuclear power industry (and there are plenty of arguments from the practical and economic to the ethical against it). But we have to hold a public discussion about it, if only to clear the air and get on with other things, namely the new activities of alt. energy. But I would hasten to warn readers (again!) that we’ll probably have to do these things more modestly too (don’t count on giant wind “farms”), and that we are liable to be disappointed by what they can actually provide for us (don’t expect to run Wal-Mart on wind, solar, algae-fuels, etc).

In any case, we’re not going back to a “consumer” economy. We’re heading into a hard work economy in which people derive their pleasures and gratification more traditionally — mainly through the company of their fellow human beings (which is saying a lot, for those of you who have forgotten what that’s about). Our current investments in “education” — i.e. training people to become marketing executives for chain stores — will delude Americans for a while about what kind of work is really available. But before long, the younger adults will realize that there are enormous opportunities for them in a new and very different economy.

We will still have commerce — even if it’s not the K-Mart blue-light-special variety — and the coming generation will have to rebuild all the local, multi-layered networks of commercial inter-dependency that were destroyed by the rise of the chain stores. In short, get ready for local business. It will surely be part-and-parcel of our local food-growing and manufacturing activities.

I hate to keep harping on this — but since nobody else is really talking about it, at least in the organs of public discussion, the job is left to me — we have to get cracking on the revival of the railroad system in this country, if we expect to remain a united country. This is such a no-brainer that the absence of any talk about it is a prime symptom of the zombie disease that has eaten away our brains.

Automobiles (the way we use them) and airplanes are utterly dependent on liquid hydrocarbon fuels, and you can be certain we’ll have trouble getting them. You can run trains by other means — electricity being state-of-the-art in those parts of the world that do it most successfully. I know that California just voted to create a high-speed rail link between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It’s an optimistic sign, but it shows more than a little techno-grandiose over-reach. High-speed rail would require a mega-expensive re-do of the tracks. We need to scale our ambitions for this more realistically.

California (and every other region of America) would benefit much more from normal-speed trains running every hour on the hour on tracks that already exist than from a mega-expensive, grandiose sci-fi program that might not get built for ten years. The dregs of the Big Three automakers can and should be reorganized to produce the rolling stock for a revived railroad system.

Even amidst the financial carnage underway right now, the public is enjoying a respite from high-priced gasoline, but it is due to be short-lived. As I’ve already said, we are in danger not just of oil prices going way back up again, but of losing access to our supplies from the exporting countries. In other words, we’re just as likely to face shortages as high prices, and soon.

Oil shortages are certain to produce a political freak-out here unless we get our heads screwed on right — and this means that the next President had better prepare quickly for a comprehensive action plan in the face of such an emergency (which has to include a robust public information initiative).

That this meltdown is building straight into the Christmas holidays is one of those accidents of history that leaves one reeling in wonder and nausea. The cable networks better be prepared to bombard the public with round-the-clock showings of It’s a Wonderful Life, because they’re going to need all the moral support they can get as zombies stalk through the silent night, holy night.

Source: Zombie Economics, Part I

Starbucks, the coffee house chain, on Wednesday blamed a “sharp weakening” in the consumer economy for an unexpected decline in its US sales, sending its shares plunging more than 10 per cent in after-hours trading.

Howard Schultz, who returned to the role of chief executive in January, said “the current economic environment is the weakest in our company’s history”, citing the housing slump and rising energy and food costs.

The company’s history goes back to 1971, the year Bretton Woods fell apart and Nixon closed the gold window. So for Schultz, things are worse now than the double-dip recession in the early 80s, the worst of the postwar era. Grim stuff indeed for a company whose entire business model is built on an “affordable luxury.”On the subject of historical comparisons, Robert Shiller — he of the Case/Shiller home price index — is going all the way back to the Great Depression, when housing prices dropped 30%. He says an even bigger drop is possible now (with prices having already fallen 15% in his estimation).

Home prices rose about 85% from 1997 to 2006 adjusted for inflation, the biggest national housing boom in U.S. history, Mr. Shiller said. “Basically we’re in uncharted territory,” he said. “It seems we have developed a speculative culture about housing that never existed on a national basis before.” Many people became convinced that housing prices would increase 10% annually, a notion Mr. Shiller called crazy.

And there’s another property time-bomb looming. In fact, it’s one of five “super shocks” about to hit the U.S. economy and stock market in the very near future. For a seven-part defense strategy, check out this special report.