Hedge fund manager, broadcaster and business analyst Damon Vickers rarely tires of retelling the greatest hits of his career. By his own estimate, he's "called the market" three times in a little over a decade - for the dot-com bubble, the subprime crisis and the subsequent financial meltdown in 2008 - and was an "early investor" in a slew of companies whose share prices only seem to rise while others fall. He's the man with the Midas touch, a real-life master of the universe.
Vickers' new book, which he bills as a survival guide to the "Armageddon of economic collapse", teases the prospect of the US dollar buckling under the weight of America's addiction to debt. Indeed, he unravels a convincing hour-by-hour scenario in which an overnight run on the Asian markets leads, within days, to chaos and then civil disorder on the streets of America. Shame then that just a few pages later he sheepishly admits that "I don't think that [scenario] is likely". It seems that America's principal backer, China, has too much at stake to let that situation occur.
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