If you labor under the thought that meaningful reform to prevent another financial crisis like the one in 2008 is coming from Washington, think again. Wall Street bankers' orgy of greed did not stop with the near-global meltdown of 2008, and the "reform" legislation in Congress is being hand-written by thousands of high-paid lobbyists as well as the industry's handmaiden, the Federal Reserve. Read Matt Taibbi's latest Rolling Stone article, " Wall Street Wars" for the wretched story of what became of solid, on-target reform of the failed regulatory squalor in which the powerful financial interests of this country wallow and thrive.

As a financial economist, I despair at what is coming, and come it will. I was right the last time, and I'll be right again this time. Solid economic theory tasked to the objective analysis of data veritably howled of a bad, bad crisis, and I wrote about it in my four-part series, "The Economics of Wreckage," my two-part series, "The Federal Reserve under Fire," and finally in my Spring 2008 article, "The Gospel of Impending Doom." My detailed explanations of theory, interpretations of historical and timely data, and predictions based thereupon did no good, of course.

I am wiser, now. Going through the same process of meticulous exposition would have no impact, but I will tell you this: the analysis that motivated my previous warnings now informs me of much greater risk of a confluence of potentially disastrous economic problems—both inflation and recession—before the next presidential election.

When the whispering breeze of a real collapse of the global financial system brushed across our distracted faces in mid-September of 2008, no one could possibly have imagined (except those of us who did, but we were doomsayers, conspiracy theorists, anti-Bush malcontents, fanatics, marginalized academics, or some other manner of noise beyond the fringe of respectable inclusion).

The tribulation will be worse this time. Much worse. Contrary to what you might have heard, the sky really can fall.

As disturbing as that light wind of foreboding catastrophe might (or might not) have been to you, it was the muted, ill breath of genuine, life-changing storms to come in the cascading shards of our broken shelter of sunshine proclaimed by failed stewards and their failed successors. Those are the men and women—our leaders, their bureaucrats, technocrats, handlers, promoters, and thinkers—who have perverted the rule of law to protect the sovereign and its hordes of enforcers, inquisitors, prosecutors, and financiers. In toiling at that work so debilitating to a nation of free people, the sovereign has, in its reign of impunity uplifted on the stage of real and imagined threats touted in endless acts and scenes, become the coalition of inhuman entities ensouled not by any nature or its god, but by the fiat of corrupted law that poses to quicken the unensoulable, be it an unaccountable government or the enterprise of commerce in corporate form.

The disaster this time will not be owned by the Bush Administration, and you can do nothing about what's coming. You might think you can, but you cannot.

As I wrote in January, "Look hard into that darkening twilight: the sun is setting behind you."

Squander the last wisps of day at your own peril.