by John Rubino, Dollar Collapse:

“War” and “pensions” are conceptually about as different as it’s possible to be. But – in a measure of how far into Crazy Town we’ve wandered – they’re both taking the world in the same direction.

If a Middle East (or Asian!) war doesn’t spike oil prices and push the global economy into recession, then pensions will probably produce the same end result. Here’s an excerpt from a much longer New York Times article that should be read in its entirety for a sense of what public finance has become: