Soros at Davos in 2011 George Soros warns of financial collapse and class warfare in a chilling interview with Newsweek's John Alridge.

“At times like these, survival is the most important thing,” he says, peering through his owlish glasses and brushing wisps of gray hair off his forehead. He doesn’t just mean it’s time to protect your assets. He means it’s time to stave off disaster. As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil.” Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether.

“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros tells Newsweek. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”

These days Soros is holding mostly cash -- he calls gold "the ultimate bubble -- along with European bonds he picked up in the MF Global firesale -- judge for yourself whether they were a cutthroat investment or altruistic support for Europe.

In Davos this week, expect Soros to give the counterpoint to Angela Merkel and Mario Draghi's optimism on the eurozone.