Accountant Brad Baturka, at LECG L.L.C. in Wayne, says he has been hearing from hardworking professional people who for years invested part of their pay in the belief they would be able to retire comfortably, now wondering if they would have done better putting it in the bank. Or maybe a shoebox.

Some people saw this coming. My wife's friends Arlene and Paul, raising four children on their Bradford County dairy farm, liked to say I made a living writing about people who "don't produce anything," meaning bankers, insurers, investors, Wall Street. It couldn't last, Paul said.

But an Inquirer story from March 2007, after the Dow Jones 30 industrials and the Standard & Poor's 500 indexes fell all of 3 percent one day, shows how hard it is to call "game over."

"Experts: No signs of a slump," read our headline. Joel Naroff at Commerce Bank, Mark Zandi at Moody's Economy.com, Joseph H. Davis at Vanguard Group Inc., Jeremy Siegel at Wharton, and Ted Aronson at Aronson + Partners - I'd trust each of them with my investments, if I invested - were among those saying reassuring things about the market's hiccup.

Alan Greenspan sounded the only cautionary note: He hedged. The market ran out of gas seven months later.

Last week, Vanguard's Davis sounded like capitulation itself. This is "the single largest financial shock since the Great Depression," he said in a video to clients. "GDP will contract significantly." The slump "could be the longest since the 1930s. The severity of the situation is palpable, and I'm not going to sugarcoat it."

Still, things might be less bad a year from now, Davis concluded - thanks to government intervention.

A new world

The report's called Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, and it promises "major discontinuities, shocks and surprises," and so many people are trying to read it, the intelligence council's Web site keeps crashing.

Here's what it predicts for global money, work and power, when our children are grown:

"A relative decline for U.S. power, and likely increase in market competition and complexity," with China, India, rising Brazil, declining Europe, and oil-dependent Russia and Iran struggling for clout in an "unstable . . . multipolar system."

"Shrinking economic and military capabilities may force the U.S. into a difficult set of trade-offs between domestic versus foreign policy priorities."

"China is poised to have more impact on the world over the next 20 years than any other country." It will be the leading economic and military competitor to the United States, as well as "the largest importer of natural resources and the biggest polluter."

"China, India and Russia are not following the Western liberal model for self-development, but instead are using a different model, 'state capitalism,' " in which government directs the economy.

"The Wall Street events of 2008 mark the opening chapters of a larger story of rebalancing," as foreign investors sell U.S. assets, the dollar drops, and the Chinese and Indian middle classes start buying like Western consumers used to.

Big Oil is on its way out. In contrast with the last intelligence report five years ago, the agencies now expect "a transition to cleaner fuels."

Finally, Washington's response to the Wall Street crisis has given heart to supporters of strong government:

"The major enhancement of the state role in Western economies, now underway as a result of the current financial crisis, may reinforce the emerging companies' preference for greater state control and distrust of an unregulated marketplace."