Sound The Trumpet : The Handwriting on the Wall

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“The Handwriting on the Wall”
by Art Sadlier
January 13th, 2009

Daniel tells us about King Belshazzar and how he conducted a drunken orgy using the vessels taken out of the Temple of God at Jerusalem. During the feast the hand of God appeared on the wall with a message of judgment. "God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. Thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting....."

The reaction to this message of judgment is what I find interesting. Apparently the king just went on with the banquet, he went through the motions of rewarding Daniel, as if he had only been a good source of entertainment. The scripture simply adds, "In that night was Belshazzar...slain."

Today we have seen the handwriting on the wall for our society, the message is coming at us from many different angles. We will not take time in this article to list the ways that we have offended a Holy God.

We will just deal with one warning sign that is coming to us at this moment, The economic collapse that is threatening to destroy us. There are two recent news items that underscore the threat.

FIRST....."US Debt a Ticking Time Bomb"

WASHINGTON, D.C. The United States faces a financial "time bomb" as its national debt is to jump by $2 trillion this year and United States President-elect Barack Obama and congressional Democrats consider a massive spending package, economists have warned.

The U.S. National Debt already stands at nearly $10.7 trillion, of which $3 trillion is held by foreign investors with China ($652.9 billion) and Japan ($585.5 billion) being the top two creditors, according to official estimates.

Within a year, 40 percent of debt held by private investors will mature, said Treasury officials quoted by The Washington Post newspaper. Short term investors are giving the government money virtually for free, as interest rates on Treasury bills have plummeted to historic lows, analysts said.

Some analysts fear that foreign investors, the largest U.S. creditors, may prove unable to absorb the skyrocketing debt, which they warn could undermine the confidence in the dollar.

DEBT DEMAND
"While the current market for T-Bills is booming, it's unclear whether demand for debt can be sustained," added Lou Crandall, chief economist at U.S.-based independent research firm Wrightson ICAP, in comments published by The Washington Post. "There's a time bomb in there somewhere, but we don't know exactly where on the calendar it's planted," the paper quoted him as saying over the weekend.

On Saturday, January 3, the Cable News Network quoted Kim Rupert, a fixed income analyst with the Action Economics research firm, as saying that "Treasurys are overbought and perhaps in a bubble, when the mood changes, it will be a case of everybody out the door at the same time."

SECOND...."Bank of England Policymaker Predicts Unprecedented Dollar collapse".

The long-held assumption that US assets - particularly government bonds - are a safe haven will soon be overturned as investors lose their patience with the world's biggest economy, according to Willem Buiter. Professor Buiter, a former Monetary Policy Committee member who is now at the London School of Economics, said this increasing disenchantment would result in an exodus of foreign cash from the US. The warning comes despite the dollar having strengthened significantly against other major currencies, including sterling and the euro, after hitting historic lows last year. It will reignite fears about the currency's prospects, as well as sparking fears about the sustainability of President-Elect Barack Obama's mooted plans for a Keynesian-style increase in public spending to pull the US out of recession. Writing on his blog , Prof Buiter said: "There will, before long (my best guess is between two and five years from now) be a global dumping of US dollar assets, including US government assets. Old habits die hard. The US dollar and US Treasury bills and bonds are still viewed as a safe haven by many. But learning takes place." He said that the dollar had been kept elevated in recent years by what some called "dark matter" or "American alpha" - an assumption that the US could earn more on its overseas investments than foreign investors could make on their American assets. However, this notion had been gradually dismantled in recent years, before being dealt a fatal blow by the current financial crisis, he said. He said investors would, rightly, suspect that the US would have to generate major inflation to whittle away its debt and this dollar collapse means that the US has less leeway for major spending plans than politicians realise.

These dire warnings have been a steady diet for over a year now, the current financial crisis is not abating but growing deeper as the days go by. We realize that if the American economy were to collapse the mighty US war machine would quickly starve to death. Such a collapse would totally change the power structure in our world and it would probably happen overnight.

This is just one of many ways the stage is being set for the last days drama to unfold.

Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13