If there is no correct action taken, US is going the route Peter predicted. The only hope is that when US unemployment rate hits 25%, similar to the 1930 level, then US people will feel enough is enough, go to the street, force the fat cats' friends in congress to set the law to limit the abused outsourcing and curb the banking monoply and medical care monoply.

imho, the root cause of today's US crisis is not as Peter said "We're abandoning capitalism and embracing socialism. That's a recipe for disaster." It is just the opposite, it is created by the insatious ,unlimited and corrputed capitalism - he can just look at the following questions:

who outsourced almost 90% of US manufacturing and 70% of computer services jobs to oversea, cause the china/india/mexico workers have less than 90% salaries and benefits than US ones ?

who controled the US central bank and set the close 0 interest rate of every saving acct so they can have free money to play, and who can print trillions dollars to rescue and contiue to support the wall street fat cats in their risky speculation and market manipulation ?

who controled the medical care market and made the expense 18% of GDP, almost a double of Canadian and European average ?

And the solution is not more capitalism, cause capitalism in those areas have corrupted, failed and become the monopoly monster out of the bottle. The solution is to use the voting power of the citizens, to create new law/new gov offices to break their monopoly and stop their reckless rip off, put the mosters back into the bottle. But that will not happen until the next great depression becomes real and close and the pain is intolerable. While anticipating this outcome, the best way to preserve personal wealth is gold bullion and solid gold stocks, like Peter said. JMT.