I find myself reading every book that goes against our current positions.  One book recently written by Peter Schiff details a horrific scene of American economic collapse due to money printing (indirectly by the FED) and a falling dollar while commodities pegged to the dollar rally due to its collapse.  Is this scenario far fetched?  Its a compelling read, that is for sure, and though many of the scenarios seem extreme there is always a possibility that the American life style needs to come down to the current global levels.  Continuing the theme in the book (paraphrasing):

Commodities are predicted to rally largely because they are in "dollars" and as the price of the commodity adjusts to a falling dollar the price will increase as the dollar loses its purchasing power for other currencies.  Gold, Oil to name a few will continue their rise until demand destruction brings the price down.  It may sound harsh, but high prices will force America to be creative and will eventually be the way out of our "services" economy that our government has been supporting for several decades.

Our return to a producing country must be supported by a government that competes with other governments that offer business incentives to produce things.  A brain drain, where foreign born students get into our best schools and then return home to grow new businesses, is directly related to our government's lack of response to pseudo free market governments.  In general, the global bull run of commodities will continue until our government gets out of the way of free enterprise.

 Scary details of a possible scenario in the future.  I agree with some aspects of this book, but for me I don't think the decoupling between our economy and the world will be enough to sink America (as countries move away from the dollar).  America is a dynamic county and as such we will respond, we always do and we always will, but government risk is increasingly becoming the one issue the rest of the world is struggling with.  What got us into this mess needs to be removed and that is: an increasingly large government trying to control a free market. 

In large part, as we move into 2011, the Peter's idea of investing in foreign markets is a good one.  He recommends Canada, Australia, Switzerland, the BRICs...basically anything NOT tied to the U.S.  Good advice for any portfolio.