Saatchi's Roberts: "We're All Going to Die! Save Yourselves!"

(MoneyWatch)  Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts didn't quite run though the streets shouting "Soylent Green is people!" but his vision of 2010 is apocalyptic nonetheless, according to an interview he gave to Arabian Business magazine.

With the recession a virtually permanent fact of life, 70 million unemployed people could go on a drug and booze fuelled crime rampage, targeting their wives and kids, he warns.

The Telegraph quotes from the Q&A in full. Roberts says:

The social costs will go through the roof, 70 million unemployed means more violence, more drugs, more alcohol abuse, more crime.

Think Chicago, London, Mumbai, 20pc of 16 year-olds don't find a job so they don't spend. They get pissed off. People will lose hope and turn to drugs and violence against weaker people, their wives and children.

Yikes! Will the post-holocaust period be more like Mad Max or 28 Days Later? He doesn't say. (He'll be holed up in Thailand anyway.) More seriously, Roberts makes some economic points:

It will be tough next year because the stimulus packages are not stimulating. They are not working,

... This is not a recession. This is a reframing of the world. Consumers are never going to go back to spending more than they earn.

This was fundamentally a problem of consumers saving nothing and spending what they didn't earn. Recession is over but the only people that can borrow money are people that have money, and they are the people that don't need it.

There's room for debate as to whether the stimulus packages aren't working. We'll know the answer next year (it can take 12 to 18 months even for "short-term" fiscal and monetary packages to work their way through the economy). As for his second point regarding saving and debt: He's right on the money.

Below: Charlton Heston in Soylent Green.