If you live in the United States, the economic news has shown some relative signs of improvement. The first quarter of the year saw GDP growth, the stock market has recouped most of the losses sustained during the Great Recession, private sector job growth has resumed and the unemployment rate, while still high, has ticked downward. In short: not great, but certainly better than the two previous years.

But if John Mauldin and Jonathan Tepper, authors of Endgame: The End of the Debt Supercycle and How It Changes Everything are correct, the U.S. is more like the Titanic hitting a small patch of rough waves shortly after leaving the dock. Most of the passengers think the turbulence is behind them, but in truth the real catastrophe lies ahead. For the U.S., as well as for much of Europe, the United Kingdom, Japan and Australia, the iceberg is the huge accumulation of sovereign debt massed over a period of decades - the "debt supercycle" in the book's subtitle. And like that ill-fated footage, there is no way for these various ships of state to avoid a painful collision. The only question is just how painful that collision will be.

Endgame is an attempt to put analytical flesh on the economist Herbert Stein's famous saying that "if something cannot go on forever, it will stop." The "endgame" of the book's title is the "stop" - the moment at which economies reach an inflection point where unsustainable debt accumulation by governments must be reversed, usually at the behest of the bond market.

This reversal entails enormous economic hardship, since the steps required to shed debt tend to depress economic growth at the very moment growth is needed the most. According to Mauldin and Tepper, economies can default on their debt (causing a massive loss of international confidence and soaring interest rates for future debts), inflate that debt away, or undertake austerity measures (curbing government spending, slashing entitlements and raising taxes). When a country faces its endgame there are no good options, only bad or worse ones.

As a result, countries facing endgame are going to experience weak to nonexistent economic growth, frequent recessions and high unemployment (to say nothing of a deeply unhappy citizenry) as they attempt to dig their way out from under their debt mountains. Welcome to the "new normal."

Endgame is, in fact, playing out right now in the countries of Europe's periphery. Portugal, Ireland and Greece - three of the five PIIGS states (the others are Italy and Spain) - have requested bailouts from the EU and International Monetary Fund. Countries in Eastern Europe (particularly Hungary) and the Balkans are in equally precarious shape. Since the PIIGS cannot simply print more Euros to inflate away their debt or devalue their currency to make their goods and services more competitive, they have undertaken severe austerity budgets to appease the bond markets. It has yet to work and the authors suggest that a default for some of the PIIGS is on the horizon.

While the U.S. has not faced a Greek-style crisis, the authors argue persuasively that a failure to rein in the deficit and tackle the debt will eventually lead to one. The United Kingdom and Australia are also on unsustainable trajectories (although the UK is currently implementing an austerity plan - with its attendant drop in GDP). As for Japan, it is "a bug in search of a windshield" - plagued not only by eye-popping levels of debt (it will take almost fifteen year's worth of tax revenues to pay off), but an ageing workforce and a declining population. Throw in the grave economic damage meted out by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and the picture only gets grimmer.

The good news, according to the authors, is that the U.S. at least still has time to escape the kind of wrenching endgame that is ravaging Europe's periphery. There is a "glide path" that the U.S. can take to safely lower the massive amounts of debt, if (a rather big if) the political will can be found. There is no way, according to Endgame, for the U.S. to escape greater economic volatility and more frequent recessions in the years ahead. Some pain is inevitable but catastrophe isn't.

If the message of Endgame is sobering and frightening, the delivery is a bit disjointed and confusing. For instance, the authors promise a country-by-country tour of various endgame scenarios at the end of the book only to dive into an extended discussion on Greece immediately in chapter two- and it's not so much a discussion but a letter that Mauldin wrote for his children explaining why Greece is in trouble.

The authors insist that the book is written so that even non-economists (even Congressional office holders) can understand it. And it is - in parts. But the book often veers into jargon and technical discussions without any hand-holding (there are, thankfully, plenty of charts). It can be repetitive at times and it occasionally wanders off on digressions about investing.

The book would have also benefited from some discussion of the social and political implications of endgame - i.e. what happens when citizens are told that the social contract needs to be rewritten to their detriment, while the banks that irresponsibly larded up their own balance sheets and precipitated the crisis get out of jail free (scratch that: with a profit). These dynamics bear directly on the political and economic decisions governments facing endgame will need to make, but outside a very brief discussion of "reform fatigue" this dimension is largely ignored.

Nevertheless, Endgame is useful reading in light of the contentious budget battles that are dominating politics both in the U.S. and Europe (eventually and inevitably) Japan and Australia. It underscores both the severity of the problem and the prospects of potential solutions. The book would have benefited from a more disciplined structure and focus, but it's hard to argue against its persistent message: warning, iceberg ahead.