In the scenario I’m about to paint for you, the dialog is fictional, but all the facts and figures are real.

The time: 1 AM, November 23, 2011, exactly two years from now.

The place: the White House, suddenly and unexpectedly under siege as a new financial crisis erupts.

The economic booms of 2010 have morphed into superbooms … the superbooms into bubbles … and the bubbles into busts.

Large banks are again on the brink. Financial markets are again in turmoil.

Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley — the outstanding survivors of an off-again-on-again debt crisis — are now its primary victims.

Investments like long-term U.S. Treasury bonds — long sought as safe harbors — are now collapsing in price, turning into torpedoes that can sink even the sturdiest of portfolios.

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