The US is on a fiscally unsustainable path and has almost entirely wasted the opportunity this crisis represented to get its house in order.
Obama, and whoever sits in the oval office next, has an enormously difficult task of explaining to ordinary people why the belt tightening that is to come applies to them and not to the banks that created the mess (and are feverishly handing out record bonuses as a result).
Given this constraint, and the general paralysis of logic that now grips DC, we can almost certainly expect that the resolution to the multi-decade game of kick-the-can will be a crisis of sorts.
The only way out is to accept the idea that living standards have to fall to match the prior excesses, an admission that 'experts' agree is politically impossible in the US at this time.
Yet the conditions and risks remain, regardless of what experts think is doable. The job of any primary bear market -- and we are in the mother of them all -- is to destroy wealth. Your job is to preserve wealth. But buckle up; it's going to be a rough ride.
My overall advice for what's to come remains: Convert your fiat money to useful things. True, gold doesn't earn any interest, but neither does money in the bank these days, and gold can't be devlaued away by reckless monetary policy. So holding precious metals for purchasing power preservation should be a fundamental part of your plans. And while there is real risk of a short-term deflationary downdraft in commodities as the Fed jawbones about ending quantitative easing, my general advice is anything that you expect to buy over the next year you should just buy now. What the heck, you'll use it anyways, and you just might buy it for a lot cheaper than later on.
Enjoy life, love your family, and note that the sun still rises, the birds still sing, and all of our human foibles will resolve themselves eventually. We've arrived at a peculiar point in history where attitude is a tangible element of your future wealth and paper money has become like fog on a warm morning.