Most friends in my peer group look at me as if I'm mad when asking me if I think we're through the worst of it - and I say to them that the global financial crisis has yet to commence.

And the global financial crisis per se will be the least of our problems. It will be the impact of the unfolding (latent) financial crisis on economies and, therefore, societies all around the world that will form the true crisis.

Right now, all our politico-banking elites are doing, day on day, is stoking up the pressure under the crisis yet to crystallise, or explode, or whatever metaphor you wish to use.

Here's the issue as far as the developed world is concerned ...

"Banks have been lending more than they have on deposit on the assumption that tomorrow's growth was collateral for today's debt - but failing to see that growth depends on growing, cheap oil-based energy ... so, in short, peak oil means that debt goes bad."

Dr Colin Campbell, founder of 'The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas'.

The predicament we now face is that we're unlikely to re-establish industrial age rates of growth sufficient to service our debt piles, let alone repay them ... principally because we've reached the end of mankind's era of cheap oil (as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard himself observed in the Daily Telegraph just a few days ago).

Everything that we've done for the past 50 years (at least), certainly in the 'developed world' - economically and socially - has been predicated on industrial age rates of economic growth. That era has come to an abrupt end, with oil spiking at $147 per barrel 4 years ago and sticking at over $100 per barrel today. That's 4 - 5 times the long-term (150-years) trend price of oil, inflation-adjusted. Our (grossly indebted) civilisation just doesn't work with oil at the price it is today (in case you hadn't noticed).

So, in summary there now has to be the mother-of-all unwinding from mountains and mountains of debt that not only can we not service, but we cannot ever repay. Debt is about to drown us. That's the nature of the crisis ahead. It's just the day of reckoning that the bankers and the politicians are colluding to put off ... with increasing desperation.