A large bricks and mortar chain coming to grief isn't an enormous surprise. It's happening throughout retail. Radio Shack, Best Buy, Office Depot, Borders Boo

A large bricks and mortar chain coming to grief isn't an enormous surprise. It's happening throughout retail. Radio Shack, Best Buy, Office Depot, Borders Books; everywhere you look chains of brick and mortar retailers are collapsing, closing, or merging. But of course, selling musical instruments is different, for unspecified reasons. Guitar Center's problems aren't just because of a changing retail environment but a searing indictment of modern capitalism that is somehow linked to the housing crisis (what?), and somehow to the declaration of martial law (huh?) and the destruction of the US dollar (uh...) that apparently happened over the last few years. Fine, the author thinks Guitar Center is about to declare bankruptcy. He's not alone; rating agencies have deemed their bonds to be junk. But neither is Guitar Center; there's a lot of failing companies around. Unless you're unlucky enough to own some of their debt (or, worse, the company itself), I have no idea why you'd care. (...which kind of makes me wonder why the author cares. If he ownd a bunch of Guitar Center bonds, I'd assume he'd just sell them. What's his angle here?)