Is the recent world credit crisis the start of the 5th stage of the mayan calender?

For any of you who know about the Mayan calender and the 7 stages (or gears if you like) do you think the current world credit crisis - rising food prices and volotile markets are the start of the 5th stage/cycle/gear? of what we believe to be the final stage of the Mayan calender?|||I doubt that it is the start or ending of anything other than the start of de-leveraging down and the end of easy credit. This is just another boom-bust cycle which is possible in an arguably free market system. We now know that rather than our system always returning to some sort of equilibrium it frequently goes to an extreme and may stay there for some time before bouncing around and settling into some other extreme. In each one of these bounces wealth in some hands is destroyed and wealth in other hands is created or magnified. Some times in these cycles more is destroyed than created and other times the opposite is true. The good thing about what is happening now is that a lot of this crappy paper going around ended up in the hands of foreign countries and they will bear some of the losses as opposed to U.S. banks and financial institutions bearing the losses exclusively and suffering financial collapse in this country. The losses are spread around the world and this is probably a good thing for us in this country. I don't think any of this had any mystical or religious significance though other than ignoring the laws of prudent finance dictated in the holy books in many religions. It'll all wash out in a few years though and we'll be back into the next bubble.|||nope. its nothing more than mythology. you can believe notradamus was right too, but doesn't mean he was. sorry... :(|||I very much doubt it. On the other hand, it might be the start of a realisation in the United States and West in general that borrowing (and lending) money to finance wasteful and self-indulgent lifestyles always ends in tears sooner or later.|||The financial crisis revealed a fundamental flaw in the essence of free world banking. When institutions who are involved in the essential servicing of the finances of our life's act in a reckless, blatantly wrong, manipulative, greedy and frankly infantile manner, we can no longer trust them and they must be replaced with a much more accountable system.