Back in the late 1990s the "Four Tigers" of Southeast Asia (Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, and Korea) overheated, their economies fell, and the U.S. caught barely a sniffle.

Well it's about to happen to China and this time we're going to get pneumonia, maybe worse. (Jeremy Wolff took this lovely picture, a mural featuring a Chinese child playing with bubbles, on a recent trip to that country, and posted the picture at Inch.Com, a New York ISP.)

China's demand for production goods is already driving prices for raw materials higher in the U.S., leading to inflation, thus higher interest rates, a falling housing market and (probably) an end to the nascent recovery.

But that's just the first course. (You know how Chinese meals are -- good ones anyway.)

The next course is going to be the popping of the China bubble.

It will go just as it did in East Asia in the late 1990s, and in the U.S. Internet economy a few years ago. Loans will go bad, businesses will go under, people will become unemployed. For the soup course think soup lines.

One result will be a flood of western loan write-offs (which the banks will make up from you), followed by a reduced supplies of manufactured goods (which means more inflation), and, when the yuan finally floats against the dollar (as many U.S. policymakers seem to want) it will fall in value, not rise.

And so we come to the entree. When Americans were laid off a few years ago, they found ways to get by. When Chinese are laid off they won't be able to go back to the farm, and whole families will go begging (literally). The social unrest from the Chinese collapse will threaten the entire system.

Here in the U.S., of course, you're talking about massive write-offs of investments, yet-cheaper Chinese imports, massive immigration (mostly illegal), and, since China is a nuclear power whose leaders will be desperate to distract the people from their growling bellies, a possible war against Taiwan that will, at a stroke, destroy our high tech sector (because most U.S. semiconductors today are made in either China or Taiwan.

Now that you know the menu, think you can get anyone here to talk about it, and what we might do about it?

I thought as much.