It is February 2008.

The world promises to be different, but will it fulfill that promise?

For the past several years, we'd been anticipating the imminent arrival of the Debtors' Union... and it does seem that The Union could arrive shortly.

The banks are close to insolvent, but it will take more than mere insolvency to weaken them enough... the Federal Reserve has issued an emergency short term lending facility to keep these banks functioning. The banks are weak, but the people do not understand fully how weak they are as of yet.

We've hatched a plan that should bring about the Ultimate Weakening Event that should illustrate to the people that they indeed have the upper hand.

It shall unfold in these simple steps:

1. Commercial Real Estate shall weaken drastically over the next 12 months. This, combined with the bringing of SIVs onto their balance sheets and the many Pier Loans that cannot be rolled, will weaken their general financial health.

2. Once the banks are weakened in the above manner, margin calls (in attempt to call in outstanding loans) will bring about the ultimate collapse of the surrounding hedge funds. This will serve as the catalyst that triggers a global blowup of a notional amount of $50 trillion of outstanding Credit Default Swaps and equity derivatives contracts.

3. As the central banks of the world attempt to flood money into the system, the Bank of England will refuse to follow suite (insisting that rampant inflation is not an acceptable cure to our current ills). This will trigger an even larger undertow due to the hundreds of trillions of dollars in outstanding interest rate and currency swaps.

4. The Bank of England will not realize, until it is too late, that this was the wrong course of action.

At some point, in the middle of these events, the average citizen will begin to realize that their individual debt load is, and has always been, all too onerous. Someone, among the people, will rise up and insist upon the necessity of a Debtors' Union. The people will insist on more fair interest rates on the debts they owe. The people will insist that certain debts be forgiven.

If these demands are not met, the people, in unison, will stop payment on their debts.

Once the system realizes that It no longer has control, the system will collapse. Obviously, there is no reasonable way to share power with the Debtors' Union. The Debtors' Union is fundamentally incompatible with our current financial system.

Pundits will rightly decry the incongruity of the aims of the Debtors' Union with that of our current financial system. They will complain that money can no longer be lent if one cannot have a reasonable expectation of being payed back.

But, in the middle of all of this, other groups will arise. These groups will understand that the fundamental weaknesses in our system have nothing to do with the lending of money. The weaknesses in our system are almost solely the result of predatory lending.

If we, as a people, are lucky, enough people will come to understand this subtle difference between Venture Capitalism and Predatory Lending.

And there will be a great battle between the adherents of The Old Way and those who believe in The New Way.

We don't know who will win.. we can only hope that the battle begins soon. It will begin eventually.

Why not now?