Hold on to your seats, the rollercoaster is about to rocket skyward...definitely maybe?

The image above illustrates the current $14 Trillion debt pile being faced by the US administration. Some commentators are describing this as the biggest crisis in US history and given the influence the US has on the rest of the world, we can be sure the challenge and consequences will not be confined to within its shores alone.

To me, this chart could be seen equally as depicting the growth and reality checks resulting from the impact of the web and the world moving from a sporadically connected economy to one that is totally wired and always-on.

Hmmm – an interesting choice of words there I think…

‘Totally wired’ and ‘always-on’ would be appropriate descriptions for an individual who was addicted to drugs or other forms of stimulant – someone who is in so deep that they literally can’t help themselves, someone powerless to change without others intervening, someone who will continue to spend money they don’t have to maintain the high, fearing that the low will be very painful and doing all it can to avoid it.

So, quite how the US believes it can generate revenues, that on the basis of this chart, are twice the earnings it achieved during the unprecedented period of the dotcom boom by the time 2020 comes around is an intriguing mystery and, as far as I can see, some people in the congressional budget office must be ingesting some very strong drugs indeed…

At this point in history this does indeed look like the delusions of some drug crazed maniac who is convinced they are about to strike it rich and all their troubles will be over – quickly and painlessly. Did I hear someone say Narconon?

This is horribly reminiscent of John Cassidy’s book dot.con which I re-read from time-to-time to remind myself of ‘how America lost its mind and its money’. There are more than a few rumblings about us being in a new dotcom (or perhaps dot.con) bubble. Some say that even if we are, it will be different than before.

Clearly, from the projections on this chart, the US is expecting this new boom to be twice as good as the last one and to start almost immediately – but how and where?

I am passionate about web technologies and their transformational capabilities but unless I have been off of Twitter too long and have missed some revolutionary insights into where the web is going (round in circles seemed to be the case last time I was there 😉 ) and how it is going to help make some phenomenal revenues for the US and a very short timescale, I’m really struggling to see how these projections can be right.

Is the US on the verge of delivering viable commercial nuclear fusion? Will we all have to pay it vast sums to clean up the environmental mess it is largely responsible for anyway? What has it really found on Mars? Has it discovered the secret of eternal life? Or does it know something about the rising BRIC economies that everyone else is missing?  So many questions… and unfortunately I’m not sure the US really has the answers any more.

Repeat after me…

One yuán (元) is divided into 10 jiǎo (角). One jiǎo is divided into 10 fēn (分)

Well, as I’ve never really got to grips with pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters this doesn’t look that different to me. I’m sure we’ll all get use to the idea eventually 🙂