By my best estimation, we are about to see a “hard landing” for the U.S. economy. I’ve been watching the signs for several months now, and in the last two weeks there have been some Big signs of imminent disaster. The stock market may be able to maintain its speculative climb in to insanity for a month or two, but sooner or later things are going to come down.

The possibility of economic uncertainty first reached my awareness earlier this year through articles written in international publications such as the UK’s Indymedia— “Why the Dollar Bubble is about to Burst” —and Canada’s Maclean’s magazine— “Is America Going Broke?”

A little while later, I heard about the trillion-dollar housing bubble. Low interest rates in the early 2000s gave rise to an investor buying frenzy, along with ARM and other exotic loans to higher-risk individuals. In the first quarter of this year, the residential housing bubble burst and has been “falling off the cliff” ever since. If the “commercial construction trails residential construction” trend holds as it always has, then we are now about to see the commercial real estate bubble burst as well. According to CalculatedRisk, this translates in to a loss of half a million jobs over the next 6 months.

Then I heard about the dismal auto sales. General Motors and Ford announced they would each slash 30,000 jobs at the end of last year. Ford hired a new CEO to try to pull the company out of its slump. According to the New York Times, significant drops in auto sales have predicted recessions 5 out of the 6 times America has undergone a recession, and concludes, “[a significant drop in auto sales] has never warned of a recession that did not occur.” Auto sales are definitely falling.

Now, in the festive Christmas season when nobody is watching, the Treasury/OMB released the Financial Report of the United States Government in which the Comptroller states (p. 152):

Despite improvement in both the fiscal year 2006 reported net operating cost and the cash-based budget deficit, the U.S. government’s total reported liabilities, net social insurance commitments, and other fiscal exposures continue to grow and now total approximately $50 trillion, representing approximately four times the Nation’s total output (GDP) in fiscal year 2006, up from about $20 trillion, or two times GDP in fiscal year 2000.

As this long-term fiscal imbalance continues to grow, the retirement of the “baby boom” generation is closer to becoming a reality with the first wave of boomers eligible for early retirement under Social Security in 2008.

Given these and other factors, it seems clear that the nation’s current fiscal path is unsustainable and that tough choices by the President and the Congress are necessary in order to address the nation’s large and growing long-term fiscal imbalance.

4 times the GDP! Can you imagine a sane bank manager offering a loan to someone whose “fiscal imbalance continues to grow”? Foreign lenders, like banks, will very soon be calling the same stops on the U.S. government. As the risk of investment increases, so will their demands on interest rates. (See also the commentary by Chris Martenson, “The United States is Insolvent“.)

As if this news weren’t foreboding enough, some shady things are also going on. The measure of how much cash is available in the world economy, a statistic published by the Fed as “M3“, was discontinued in March of this year. From what I understand, it’s possible to put M3 together using the still-published M0, M1 and M2 statistics (plus some other pieces, I presume), and someone has done just that. According to this calculated M3 stat, the real inflation rate of the U.S. dollar is closer to 8 or 9 percent.

My last observation, and the one that convinces me that we’re really in for a big dip here, is that everyone is starting to catch on. There’s an elephant in the room, and we know it. And people are talking about it all over the ‘net. It’s on Digg and Reddit. It’s in blogs. The international papers have long ago covered the topic, and are continuing to do so. And, cautiously, our U.S. news outlets are making mention of it too.

What should you do? Get out of debt. Invest in gold. Invest in silver. Diversify your currency in to the Euro, Swiss Franc or some other foreign currency that isn’t heavily tied to the U.S. dollar. And scoop up some stocks in mining companies or indexes such as NYSE:GLX. I’m also invested in some smaller startups like American Creek Resources in Canada.

If the U.S. dollar collapses and is replaced by something like the Amero, you don’t want to trade dollars for Ameros. You will get a very bad deal.