Do you actually believe that this is the most likely outcome? While nothing is impossible I find this outcome incredibly improbable. Does the world really look bleaker than during the depression with 40% unemployment? How about WW2 with gasoline, meat, butter, sugar rationed and millions of men in uniform? The cold war with the world on the brink of nuclear holocaust? The 60s: over 57000 dead in Vietnam, assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, yes there were riots in many cities but nothing like what you were talking about. The massive bear market of the 70s with stagflation and double digit inflation and double digit interest rates and double digit unemployment. Even in Mexico today which is on the brink of being a failed state, there is nothing like what you are talking about going on.
Again the highly improbable is not impossible, but read your history.
Put your money where your mouth is: What specifically are you doing to prepare?
Interesting that you bring this up, it reminds me of some things Colin Powell said when asked if he thought the US was in decline (can't find the reference). Essentially he said he lived through the era of race riots, the Cold War, Vietnam, the oil embargo, when the national mood was as bleak as could be - and life went on, so he wasn't super worried about the problems we face today.
As the forum's #2 paranoid poster
behind Narcotized, I'll go on record as stating I don't think Clubber Lang's prediction will come to pass.
I expect a gradual decline. Inflation in stuff we need (food, energy, clothing, healthcare), deflation in stuff we have (real estate, wages). A world in which we're all poorer. But just as life has gone on in Argentina after their 2001 financial system collapse, life will go on here.
BUT - to borrow my least favorite phrase from bubble discussions, there are some things that suggest this time is different. The US isn't just another economy, it is
the world economy, with the world reserve currency. Peak oil is here, though the term "peak oil" means different things to different people with different agendas. When I say it, I don't mean I think that the oil is gone (far from it), only that extraction costs are getting onto the steep part of the curve at the same time production rates are peaking, which means energy costs must continue to rise ... and they'll rise faster in the face of a meaningful economic recovery.
Argentina's financial system collapsed in the context of a stable and prosperous world, and 10 years later they're still a shadow of what they once were. Argentina wasn't as racially, economically, politically, culturally divided as we are. We have further to fall, and no one to lean on.
I don't see a way out of the financial hole the US has dug. To predict major social and cultural stresses and changes to accompany this slow-motion financial disaster isn't too far fetched.
I'm aware that all the people who say nothing catastrophic will happen are, thus far, absolutely correct.
To answer the question you posed to Narcotized, what have I done?
- Most important, we've chosen to live in a rural area. No small feat, since the Navy gets to tell me where to live. It's taken some effort. Every event, natural or unnatural, is worse in a city.
- We're armed. This doesn't need to morph into another gun thread, but if London-esqe riots came to my town, you wouldn't see me defending myself with a frypan the way some shopkeepers on the BBC were/are. That said, I have no silly illusions that a gun is likely to play any role in what happens to me. I expect and hope to die of natural causes decades from now, having never shot anybody.
- We have food and water stored. Food in the United States is absurdly cheap. There's no reason not to have a couple months (or more) of it in a closet. No, I'm not Mormon. I don't fear Biblical end times in the least. But you won't see me or mine hungry or thirsty at the local Superdome-equivalent waiting for the National Guard or FEMA to rescue us.
- Enough fuel & alternative energy production to cook and keep the house cool in summer. It doesn't get cold enough to really need heat in the winter. Energy supply disruptions happen - in the 70s with the oil embargo, in Japan after their quake/tsunami/meltdown, Katrina.
- Debt avoidance.
So in short - basic, simple, attainable individual and family preparedness. Which puts us ahead of 99% of the rest of the US in any conceivable event - whether it's job loss, disability, illness, major natural disasters, riots or a violent crime wave, hyperinflation, pandemic
bird swine monkey flu, meteor showers, or the dead rising from the grave to feast upon the delicious flesh of the living.
