Gather ‘round, ye salty dogs and ink-stained bilge-rats, for the horizon ain't lookin’ like a Caribbean sunset. Nay, it’s lookin’ like the gaping maw of a leviathan what’s missed its breakfast for a fortnight. The word from the gilded, ivory towers of Wall Street is enough to make a dead man’s toes curl and a ghost’s teeth chatter. A certain parchment-pusher and famed doom-monger, the one they call Nouriel Roubini, has been screeching from the crow's nest that the economic gale of 2008 was naught but a 'Sunday school picnic.' If that previous gale was a picnic, then what’s headin’ our way is a hurricane brewed in the very pits of the abyss, designed to splinter our hulls into toothpicks.

Back in the days of The Great Recession, we thought the world was ending because a few fancy galleons lost their rudders and some bankers lost their wigs. But this new prophecy? It suggests the entire ocean is about to evaporate, leavin' us high and dry on the jagged rocks of bankruptcy. Our Quartermaster, 'Shaky-Hands' McFee, looked at the flickering charts this mornin' and spit out his salt-beef in a fit of terror. 'Captain,' he whimpered, 'the interest rates are climbin' higher than a cabin boy on a sugar high, and the value of our doubloons is sinkin' faster than a lead-lined coffin in the Mariana Trench.' Even the high lords at the Federal Reserve seem to be rowin' their lifeboats in opposite directions while the mainmast snaps like a dry twig under the weight of mountain-high debt.

Lord Posh-Bottom of the East India Board of Trade was overheard blubbering into his port wine last Tuesday at the Admiral’s Arms. 'It’s not just a correction, you see,' he sobbed to a common barmaid who was just tryin' to mop up the spilled grog. 'It’s a systemic liquefaction of the very foundations of our maritime credit!' Translation for you lot who don't speak 'privileged lubber': the treasury chests are filled with sawdust and mothballs. When this debt-bubble pops, it won’t be a gentle 'pop' like a soap bubble in a bathtub; it’ll be a thunderous explosion that’ll rattle the teeth of every merchant from here to Washington D.C. We’re talkin’ about a collapse so total that even the sharks will be filing for legal protection against their creditors.

The consequences for us freebooters are dire indeed. How are we to plunder the trade routes when the merchant ships are all ghost vessels with empty holds and IOUs taped to the masts? If the grog prices triple and the price of gunpowder goes to the moon, we’ll be reduced to throwing insults and stale hardtack at our enemies instead of iron shot. The so-called 'Dr. Doom' of the ledger-books warns that stagflation—a word that sounds like a sea-monster and acts like a parasite—will bleed our economies dry while the sharks of debt circle the wreckage of our portfolios. He says we’re facing the 'mother of all debt crises,' and frankly, I’ve seen mothers-in-law less terrifying than these red-lined spreadsheets.

So, sharpen your cutlasses and bury what little gold ye have left under a very specific, unmarked palm tree. The 'Picnic' is over, and the storm clouds are bruised purple with the blood of failing banks. We’re sailing into the heart of a darkness that makes the Lehman Brothers collapse look like a pleasant game of tiddlywinks on a calm afternoon. Keep one eye on the horizon and the other on your purse-strings, for the Great Maelstrom is hungry, and it don't take no paper promises for payment. If the ship goes down, I’ll see you all at the bottom of the ledger, where the ink is always red and the rum is always gone!