Forget about 2012, it's 2020.

Marc Faber recently put it as 2018 (he gave "capitalism" 5-10 years time before it all turns to anarchy - http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-marc-faber-the-future-will-be-a-total-disaster-with-a-collapse-of-our-capitalistic-system-as-we-know-it-2009-9), which is not far off from the Club of Rome's 2020 "overshoot and collapse"("Limits to Growth").

Focus on the first 10-15 minutes of the video (skips the Australian case).

http://www.themonthly.com.au/limits-growth-2009-graham-turner-1580

Silver lining: behavioral change of human beings can be like a flip of the switch. Think the "Twitter-Iran-Election" phenomenon :) (let's all consume as little as possible and use sustainable energy etc. and start having as few children as possible by spreading birth control technologies to the poorest countries in the world as they often have the fastest population growth rates).

One way or the other, it's the moral imperative for us to protect the planet and live in sustainable manners (as opposed to the unsustainable exponential growth).

Forget about 2012, it's 2020.

The sport of speculation?

The name of the blog is meant to describe how "thinking" is a kind of sport. "Global Macro" is like "chess", my father calls it a "mind sport"; well, he was the Canadian team lead in the First World Mind Sports Games(October, 2008).

Really, it takes certain "peculiarities" to engage in such a sport. It doesn't hurt to have a "ferrari" brain (fast and furious processing speed), well built with many relevant dendrites ( be a student of histories, cultures, able to read/listen to different languages helps), think in empathetic as well as analytical/scientific mentality. And extra lung capacity to boot (for moments like the fall of Lehman last fall) to side-step the hardness of breathing etc.

As a student of neurosciences, I was told that females are more empathetic (more attune to Robert Shiller's "animal spirits"). Ladies can also engage in more "global thinking", as in using both the logical/analytical Left hemisphere and the more creative/big picture thinking Right hemisphere thanks to the luxury of having a large corpus callosum. But being the fairer sex, they might not have the "ambitions" or drive necessary.

Scientists are more analytical and logical then most other disciplines and that's why hard scientists are sought after in high finance but they tend to be "Quant types" and rely less on "common sense" as some are complaining about the overly mathematical nature of funds these days.

Older people have more "dendrites"as they have accumulated knowledge of histories, cultures, multiple languages among other things.

Young people have the fast and furious reaction time and processing speed.

What a "freak" combo, we are probably looking at a whole "team" here.

But can a team "cut it"? Maybe, if they have no communication problems, cultural/personality conflicts and or conflict of interests.

If not, can it be all embodied in a person? George Soros maybe one (he is multicultural/languages in upbringing, ambitious, a close study of human emotion and market behaviour via his reflexivity observation/social theory, probably a fast thinker as traders usually are and very logical/analytical as Philosophy studies usually demand).

The sport of speculation?