It is rather dull waiting for all of this debt to collapse. Whether we call it 'extend and pretend', 'delaying the inevitable', delay the day' and any other such labels that magical financing brings up, government has subprimed the pump for a few years now, and nowhere more than China or the United States. Opposites attracting for a united ruin.
We have had some calm for a while now, since markets don't appear to be able to digest more than one crisis at a time if generated from within. Events are moving beyond the markets: with upheavals in the Middle East placing, perhaps, too much weight on the entitlements of the West for their survival in their present form.
An oil shock could produce such a whirlwind that the bow wave of a reserve currency dying leaves Irish or Greek default as a careless whisper, blown away before it registers beyond the local setting. One can perceive dimly and wide eyed the worst case scenario of this potential tsunami: the United States wrecked and insular; Europe broken: its currency union divided, its markets balkanised and a North African littoral condemned to a generation of irrational and imperialist fundamentalisms; Japan condemned to a rapid decline in living standards under the twin decay of debt slavery and depopulation; a China, recentralising and marshalling a cheated bourgeoisie through post-communist expansionism, fighting chosen wars with its proxies.
We have the potential to revisit the 1930s under our policy mistakes and, then as now, not all representative institutions survived.