Since I’d written this article on Helium.com under the pen name “Tom Mix”, my forecasts have begun to make themselves your reality much faster than I had predicted. If you haven’t read this article, please do so because you are living through it as you live and breathe.

And now, the body of the original article which predicts the events to come:

The ensuing five years are going to bring tremendous personal economic challenges for the citizens of the world’s industrialized nations. Oil will become a luxury. Personal retirement investments will evaporate. Health care and prescription costs will bring entire sectors of the population to their knees and, lastly, food prices and shortages will put at risk the health of every citizen of the industrialized world.

Petroleum is the raw material necessary for the manufacture of nearly all products upon which human beings depend. The current petroleum crisis, though sudden and severe, is a mere shadow of that which the next five years will bring.

Oil producing nations and the companies which explore for and extract petroleum from far beneath the surface of the Earth have misinformed the public and overstated the volume contained within the oil fields in their charge. The amount is far smaller than they have publicly proclaimed. The companies have been the recipients of huge tax breaks and incentives designed to build the infrastructure to bring the oil to the surface and to market, but only in the belief by the respective nations that the national investment was based on sound information. The governments and the public at large have been deceived. Petroleum shortages will become a way of life within the next five years.

Every individual who owns a personal retirement account will see the value of their investments plummet to a level below the principal monies they deposited. Baby Boomers, that huge demographic subset of the population, have suffered through three major economic declines in the prior twenty years which have decimated their retirement savings. Don’t look now, but there will be another one, a last straw, beginning next year. The year 2009 will see enormous numbers of people begin to withdraw their retirement funds, many accounts to be emptied and closed completely.

Retirees will have had it with Wall Street starting next year. As soon as they reach the minimum legal age to retire they will remove all of their retirement monies from the stock market and place them into guaranteed, insured fixed income investments. In order to accomplish this they will, of course, be selling the mutual fund stocks within which their savings were invested. The global supply of stocks will greatly outnumber the demand and you’re broker won’t be able to find buyers for the stocks which you are trying to unload. By 2010, if you hadn’t already sold your portfolio and transferred everything to guaranteed instruments, you will have almost nothing remaining in your retirement accounts to withdraw.