Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Majrelende wrote

Reply to comment by vandemic in Friday Free Talk! by An_Old_Big_Tree

I am not sure if I follow your reasoning... would you mind explaining?

2

vandemic wrote

Aight so...

During the last 30 years, we were basically living on our credit cards: shipping off our industry abroad and then using our debt-based money to pay others to do the work and sell us their stuff. At home, we built a system that imports everything from abroad or are service jobs like restaurants. This created a fragile prosperity that depended on always going further in debt and always having foreign countries accept our money.

The system overcame the 2008 crisis, which was due to a small portion of people not paying their mortgages, which set off a domino fall in everything. This occurred because people saw their houses as worth less money and stopped spending while banks saw losses on their loan collateral and stopped lending. The solution was to print enough money and buy up everything that was falling in value so people would spend and banks would lend again. It worked well because the 2008 problem required a solution that this system can easily provide.

This time tho, it's different. Now dollars are being printed at increasing rates, but less stuff is being made. The stuff that was made before the flu hysteria is being bought. More dollars are chasing less stuff. This means the value of the dollar is diluted. However, it doesn’t have an immediate effect because many newly printed dollars are just sitting in bank accounts and we still have stuff to sell in warehouses. Lots of companies and individuals have debts that must be paid in dollars, so there’s a demand for them despite all the printing. Also, prices are sticky because everyone expects a return to normalcy and people still expect to pay a certain amount for a certain thing. Later they’ll react when stuff gets harder and harder to find, and the only people still selling it are “price gouging”.

For these reasons, the dollar’s fall won’t be immediate and the dollar could even rise in value before plummeting.

But understand that this system was not designed for self-sufficiency. You know what I'm saying? There aren’t small farms everywhere for everyone to return to like it was back in the 1930s. The State must keep printing dollars to support people or there will be mass-disorder. However by printing dollars and showing weakness, they’re demonstrating to our overseas trading partners that they can just keep their stuff for themselves rather than sell it to us. As these foreign countries see the dollar losing value, they’ll unload their dollars as well, creating an avalanche.

At this point the dollar system will confront a crossroads: the Fed will have to offer dollar credit lines to all businesses in all the world, and all foreign political and business authorities will have to bow down to the US and become modern slaves or the dollar system will fragment and the purchasing power of it will collapse. The American empire will experience a loss of power faster and greater than the fall of the USSR and with much more human suffering.

So, again. Basically, look at your body, and consider that this is all that you are going to have this time next year. All of the property, the savings, the things you collected – will be gone. You are effectively going to be dumped naked into an entirely new world, where nothing that you built before will matter, save for the person you’ve built yourself into, along with your relationships.

As far as the USA is concerned, what you are going to have in the coming months is a totally and completely wrecked nation, with tens of millions of homeless, food shortages, martial law, government bunkbeds, government soup, FEMA camps, kill lists, riots and everything else you can think of from your favorite and least favorite science fiction dystopia films.

From there, things will progressively spiral, over a period of one to three years, I'm guessing, until parts of the country begin to break off, as areas become ungovernable, as the federal government loses the ability to maintain martial law in certain regions. Religious cults will be big, as will criminal gangs. Most other forms of social organization are going to fall away.

Over the next couple of months... a lot of people are going to tell you things will eventually "go back to normal", and you’ll have a certain desire to believe them. But you can't, because they're wrong. Nothing is going back to normal. Nothing is coming except chaos as the system collapses all around us. You need to use this time to start getting used to having nothing... except maybe those things that really mattered all along, like good health and good people.

My core piece of advice is this:

Get strong. Legally acquire some weapons; a good rifle and a sidearm. Consider putting a plan together to get out of the cities while the getting is still good. Think ahead about food security and start networking with other people as much as you possibly can.

5

polpotisevil2 wrote

Maybe you are right, but I think you are forgetting military strength and the willingness of the american people to go to war for economic interests. As well as the resurging movement to bring some manufacturing into america ("make/keep america great again")

Not that your advice is bad. That's close to my advice during a normal situation, COVID-19 or not.

2