Reading the comments below, it completely sounds like the Housing Bubble discussions between 2004 and 2008. You had the doomsayers saying for years that "house

Reading the comments below, it completely sounds like the Housing Bubble discussions between 2004 and 2008. You had the doomsayers saying for years that "house prices are too expensive, there's going to be a crash" and the momentum chasers saying "no, this time it's different, there's not enough land, house prices are here to stay." In the comments, you have the same sentiment of "It's too frothy, there has to be a pullback", or "There won't be a pullback, this time it's different than 2008." After surviving the dotcom crash and the 2008 financial crash, it definitely seems like we are headed towards a global recession in 2012. No matter what path we take, whether Europe can save itself or not, the best case scenario is going to be a sharp pullback in European economic output. Worst case is that the euro falls apart and the entire global financial system is rocked. My guess is that Germany won't allow this to happen because they will suffer disproportionately, so they will allow the issuing of Eurobonds. So that being said, economic growth will slowdown worldwide. I think the US is the best place to be, given its sluggish-but-not-catastrophic growth. BUT it's not the US's GDP that matters, it's the investments of American rich people that matters in terms of funding VCs. If rich people take a hit because a majority of their investments get whacked, then they will stop investing in venture funding. There's a pretty strong correlation between VC funding and the stock market. Already the markets are down pretty hard since they topped in June. If you remember the dotcom boom, it was during a massive bull market in the stock market. As well, after the crash of 2008, the nadir of the markets being March 2009, there's been almost a doubling of the stock market since then, so by 2011 lots of rich people got very, very rich and are willing to spread out their investments. However, since June, the US markets are down 15%. The German market is down almost 30%, Chinese markets down 23%, Indian markets down 22%, Brazil down 25%. There are a lot of rich people around the world that don't feel as rich as they used to. If this trend continues and spills over to 2012, these rich people will definitely pullback on discretionary investments, the top of them being venture funding. So if you want a gauge on how VCs will behaving, I'm personally going to be looking at the stock market to see how it's going to behave.