Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: Endgame 1

Part One: The End of the Debt Supercycle 11

Chapter 1: The Beginning of the End 15

Chapter 2: Why Greece Matters 31

Chapter 3: Let’s Look at the Rules 45

Chapter 4: The Burden of Lower Growth and More Frequent Recessions 73

Chapter 5: This Time is Different 91

Chapter 6: The Future of Public Debt: An Unsustainable Path 109

Chapter 7: The Elements of Deflation 133

Chapter 8: Inflation and Hyperinflation 157

Part Two: A World Tour: Who Will Face Endgame First? 175

Chapter 9: The United States: The Mess We Find Ourselves In 181

Chapter 10: The European Periphery: A Modern-Day Gold Standard 215

Chapter 11: Eastern European Problems 233

Chapter 12: Japan: A Bug in Search of a Windshield 247

Chapter 13: The United Kingdom: How to Quietly Inflate Away Your Debt 261

Chapter 14: Australia: Could It Follow in Ireland’s Footsteps? 273

Chapter 15: Unintended Consequences: Loose Monetary Policies and Emerging Markets 283

Conclusion: Investing and Profiting from Endgame 293

Epilogue: Some Final Thoughts 297

Notes 301

About the Authors 309

Index 311

Hundreds of books have been written about the financial crisis that engulfed the world after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. But what if the bigger financial crisis is ahead of us, not behind us?

As John Mauldin and Jonathan Tepper deftly illustrate in this controversial book, the crisis was more than a half-century in the making. The Great Financial Crisis, however, was merely Act I. Act II has now begun.

The massive household deleveraging and historic shift of private debt onto government balance sheets now underway all over the world represents the end of a sixty-year global Debt Supercycle. We have now entered the Endgame, a time when bankruptcies and defaults (disguised as “restructuring”) will not be of households and companies but of governments. The stakes are now higher. The coming crises will offer policymakers few good choices and many bad ones. It will require extraordinary clarity and courage from leaders, courage that so far is largely completely lacking.

Yet, despite the authors’ dark forecast, the message in Endgame is not all gloom and doom. The book lays out positive steps governments can take to weather the worst of the stormy days ahead, minimize the inevitable pain and discomfort most of us can expect to experience, and chart a bold new course to sustained economic growth and prosperity.

It also offers investors an abundance of useful analysis and expert advice on how to protect their assets during the worst of it and prosper from the many new opportunities that will emerge globally as they present themselves.

In Part 2, the authors take readers on a country-by-country tour—including the United States, UK, European countries, and Japan—clearly explaining the problems each country faces, as well as the good and bad policy options open to each, and the investment pitfalls and opportunities likely to be found in each national economy.

Whether you call it the Great Recession, the Great Financial Crisis, or the Global Debt Crisis, what we are experiencing is unlike anything seen in eighty years. Now is not the time to succumb to panic and superstition. It is a time for courage and intelligent decision making informed by the brand of rational analysis and wisdom you’ll find in Endgame.