Every time I read your analyses, I get more worried. That doesn’t mean “paralyzed,” no: My family and I are setting up as big a garden as we can as fast as we can, we’ll shortly be building a chicken coop as a source of eggs & meat, we’ve laid in dried goods in our “cold room” and we’re working on adding solar & wind (we’re on a ridge top), even though we have firewood right now for the next two winters.

Our finances are another matter, especially since it’ll be next to impossible for us to become 100% self-sufficient anytime soon — and we’re far from urban supply centers, meaning we’re gasoline-dependent. If our dollar’s days are indeed numbered and if, say, the Chinese-Russian-U.N. scheme for a “new international reserve currency” does come to fruition as a result of a dollar collapse, what worries us is the effect that might have even on supposedly safe-haven equities such as Loew’s (L).

Assume, for a moment, our dollar is trashed, assume, God forbid, we actually get into anything remotely approaching “Zimbabwe-style” hyperinflation, how on earth do you picture even “rock-solid” American companies and their equities coming out of THAT kind of maelstrom???

Buying gold coins sounds risky to us: If we ever had to USE those coins to buy or barter, in a really chaotic situation we figure that’d only mark our home as a robbery target. Going to cash under a mattress sure doesn’t make sense, either. Our key question then, I guess, is what exactly we CAN do to try to salvage the value our dollar savings now still have….so our family can “come out on the other side” with that value intact, maybe, just maybe, even enhanced….even if that value were then denominated in “something else”..???

i do not know if computerization has any impact on these changes but given that the banks create money ex nihilo i suspect that there is minimal impact since the long pole in the tent is human action rather than exchange of data.

as this trend accelerates i would suspect that the demand for dollars would start to subside resulting in downward pressure on the dollar. of course this will not happen overnight but chinese time horizons have never been short….

now i have no expectation that the chinese communists are any more virtuous than the american banksters but this will eventually force americans to lower their standards to corruption from absolute corruption.

the real solution is a gold standard but no country will accept that discipline until their hands are forced.

Thus, we had inflation 6 months ago only to have deflation now before hyperinflation will be upon us in who knows when. What follows will be chaos, I suppose.

By the way, when the last emir left the Alhmabra, his mother was said to have scolded him, ‘Son, go ahead and cry like a woman, since you didn’t fight like a man,’ or something like that. So, I guess if the dollar is going down, it must not go down without a fight.