Endgame: The End of the Debt Supercycle and How It Changes Everything by Mauldin, John, and Tepper, Jonathan - 2011

As John Mauldin and Jonathan Tepper deftly illustrate, the 2008 financial crisis was more than a half century in the making. That, however, was merely Act I. In their view, Act II has now begun. The massive household deleveraging and the historic shift of private debt onto government balance sheets represents the end of a sixty-year global debt supercycle. The authors argue that we have now entered the Endgame, a time when bankruptcies and defaults (disguised as "restructuring") will not be of households and companies but of governments. Now, the stakes are higher. The coming crises will offer policymakers few good choices. The times will require extraordinary courage from leaders, courage that so far has been largely absent. Nonetheless, despite this dark forecast, the message in this book is not all doom and gloom. The authors point out positive steps that governments can take. They also offer investors an abundance of useful analysis and expert advice, especially to protect assets and ulimately prosper.