Armageddon.

Armageddon.

I'm fleeing from Armageddon, sir.

Stephen Petranek counts down to Armageddon

And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.

And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.

The southern hemisphere considers itself free from the instruments of Armageddon. We have added to our objectives the promotion of cooperation among nuclear weapon free zones, strengthening our resolve to achieve a nuclear weapon free world.

During the global financial crisis, even the safety of bank deposits and government bonds was in doubt for some investors. If you worry about financial Armageddon, it is indeed metaphorically the time to stock your bunker with guns, ammunition, canned food, and gold bars.

At that point, the Armageddon scenarios of droughts, rising sea levels, floods, energy and resource wars, and mass migration will become a reality. Just think of the images of recent storms and floods in the Philippines and Vietnam that displaced and killed thousands, and multiply those horrors manifold.

But Draghi and his colleagues will proceed in small steps, given fears in Germany that quantitative easing is just another name for runaway inflation. Initially, the ECB will buy a small volume of government bonds when this fails to produce economic Armageddon, it will begin to scale up its purchases.

The aftermath of the 1907 crash drove the hegemonic power of the time Great Britain to reflect on how it could use its financial clout to enhance its overall strategic capacity. That is the conclusion of an important recent book, Nicholas Lambert s study of British economic planning and the First World War, entitled Planning Armageddon.

The long predicted Armageddon has arrived, and not just in a Hollywood movie. The huge global trap that our increasingly distressed planet has become does not issue licences for survival to countries or businesses. It does not provide protection from acid rain or the impacts of El Niño, nor does it abide by or believe in ideologies and cultures.

Likewise, in the fall of 2008, the threat of financial Armageddon brought not just Germany but the whole world to the brink of disaster. The worst has been mitigated and obscured in the wealthy countries by running up unprecedented levels of debt, but any moderately streetwise person knows that the next generation and even the one after that will be paying for the excesses of the investment bankers.