In most developed countries, the past decade has undoubtedly been the hardest time to build financial wealth since the Great Depression. Aspiring wealth builders have been hit with a cluster bomb of stagnating economic growth and wages, high unemployment, poor career advancement opportunities, soaring living costs, paltry fixed income investment returns, and increasingly volatile financial markets.
Unfortunately, my research has found that it will become even harder to build financial wealth in the next ten to fifteen years or so because the Global Financial Crisis is far from over despite the desperate efforts of institutions such as the media and government to convince the public otherwise. Rather than encouraging a sustainable economic recovery, central banks have created what I call a “Bubblecovery” or bubble-driven recovery by inflating a series of dangerous, but temporary growth-boosting bubbles around the entire world, from Canada to China to the U.S. stock market. The inevitable ending of this Bubblecovery will finish where the 2008 Crisis left off, causing living standards to plummet even further and depressing the value of common investments for a very long time.