I am far more convinced about hyperinflation than any of the details of how it will impact my island or that my own security preparations are enough.
Are you not concerned that this may be shortsighted? The collapse we are heading into is really, really big. It's epochal, social, and environmental, not just financial. Even according to a purely rational extrapolation from your own financial predictions, shit is really going to hit the fan in an extremely unprecedented way.
First note that many places had hyperinflation without resulting in anarchy. In fact crime levels usually just go up slightly. Now we have never had hyperinflation in a world reserve currency (or maybe ex-world reserve currency by the time hyperinflation is really going). So things are going to be worse. But it is really hard to have any confidence about how exactly things will be.
The US won't have hyperinflation without anarchy, I'd be willing to wager.
Mexico is already in a state of essentially full-blown anarchy, and the condition will tend to spread as the impoverishment of local governments and commercial growth coalitions creates a power vacuum.
Something like 80% of the cost of food in America and most of the first world is the cost of oil, since we mostly eat extremely processed food. That means that when the dollar loses its position as the world reserve currency and oil prices go mad, food prices will immediately go mad, too. City and State governments won't be able to do anything because they're bankrupt and selling off infrastructure to pay bills. Federal governments will likely intervene to attempt to avert a food crisis, but if all they have to pay for food is debauched dollars, they won't be able to do much good. Keep in mind that at the same time, climate change and soil degradation caused by industrial monocultural agriculture is causing a crash in food production all over the world.
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http://www.larouchepac.com/node/15393
http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editoria ... -the-world
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7289194.stm
http://www.agrimoney.com/news/australia ... -1376.html
http://www.thetotalcollapse.com/crop-wa ... at-region/
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2011/02 ... -save.html
http://www.naturalnews.com/028495_agric ... otash.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... s-collapse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder
http://seekingalpha.com/article/247155- ... y-concerns
http://www.wheat.commoditynewszone.net/ ... in-us.html
(information about the oncoming collapse of US agriculture is harder to find than China and Russia because they are hiding it, but we didn't know about it for those countries until it happened, either.)
Russian and Australian agriculture collapsed last year, China's is collapsing this year, and ours is in critical condition and will likely collapse next year. This is happening now.
There will also be devastating water shortages.
http://finance.yahoo.com/real-estate/ar ... t-of-water
http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/03/ ... WY20090311
http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/watersustainability/ (the problem is more near-term than this last one suggests!)
If the market goes, so goes the dollar. If the dollar goes, there will be fuel shortages and food and water shortages. If there are food and fuel and water shortages amid a backdrop of serious economic hardship, in one of the most heavily armed societies on earth, there will be anarchy.
Anyway, as long as people are free to adapt they tend to find ways. Instead of saving dollars people can buy cans of tuna. The problem is if the governments try to do price controls or combat "hoarding". Then the economy can really be destroyed.
Markets are not magically perfect, unfortunately. You absolutely can NOT buy cans of tuna if there isn't any to be had because human exploitation has caused a collapse of the entire global tuna population, as is taking place! The same will be true of many, many other goods. You cannot buy food if your society, or its powerful neighbors, has foolishly destroyed the ability of the land to produce sustainance, and you cannot buy water if there is none to be had. Assuming that everything will be fine unless the government mucks it up is far too trusting.
I am really not sure how well my island will cope. But I much rather be here than in a big city where many people live off the government.
If you are right about the coming financial crisis, it seems like it'd be worthwhile to explore the consequences of that on your local level. I mean, like, who physically controls the fresh water sources and distribution infrastructure? How much food is imported, and from where? Under what conditions could those imports be disrupted or siezed? How likely are those import's sources to collapse? How defensible is the island from attack by outside factions? What percentage of the people living on the island would be unable to afford food if prices rise steeply, and what actions will they take? etc etc.
The most likely conclusion to be drawn from this line of questioning is probably that it's safer to live in fertile inland rural areas, away from population concentrations and built-up areas but near sustainable fresh water sources that can be used for sustainable food production. If you can figure out how to get a simple algae bioreactor system running, you could produce your own fuel, too, and live off the grid and away from the chaos, stealthily and securely.
Since a large fraction of Americans own guns, I don't really think crime will go up that much. Criminals will be shot.
I'm sorry, but you have no earthly idea what you are talking about here. I totally support our second ammendment right to own firearms, but anyone who thinks that the easy availabilty of cheap, powerful weapons to a desperate and hungry population will *reduce* violence is completely living in a fantasy world. I was in the dead zone a week after Katrina hit helping with relief efforts, and I have an idea of what really happens when the social fabric collapses. To be sure, criminals will be shot - but they will do a lot of shooting themselves, too. Many societies in the world are both poor and heavily armed - and not one of them is peaceful because of it. Innocents are harmed by this violence much more often than agressors.
Police are not paid out of the Federal budget, so they are probably still around.
Do you think that they will be? Cities and states are going bankrupt already. Their impoverished populations won't be able to pay enough in taxes to support the current level of services + graft, but the political class will cut the services, including the police, before they cut the graft. This is already going on in many cities now, and it will certainly continue after the financial meltdown, especially given that for political reasons many states will probably not adopt a hard currency for some time after the dollar is wiped out.
On the other hand, if 16% of the population were to suddenly stop getting their food stamps, there will be problems.
There will be, but it's not just a 'poor person' problem. It's going to be more than the bottom 16% that will have trouble getting enough food - think more along the lines of the bottom 75% and you will start to get an idea of the size of the problem.
I sort of figure the Federal government has to be cut in half or it may just fail altogether. But the states do some of the social programs.
Given that there's no political will to cut it in half, failure is a reasonable expectation. But given how much the federal givernment is entertwined into a dependant civil society, how could that failure not be disasterous?
States won't have any money for social programs, either. Even if they switch to hard currencies, they will have no specie reserves, no ability to borrow, and minimal tax income. Things are not going to be okay, and there is no one waiting in the wings to avert a humanitarian catastrophe.
If there is dangerous unrest in America and things are fine here we might have all kinds of rich people move here. We are a like a small town with a moat around us. If times get hard we might be very careful about who we let in.
You might have some rich people moving in, but mostly you'll probably have *armed* people moving in to sieze resources. Narco cartels already operate semi-submersibles in Columbia, so island-hopping in the caribean should pose no problem to them. An island full of pleasant well-off people with stores of water, food, fuel, silver, ammo, medicine, kidnap-ees and working ATM cards would definitely present a juicy target for raiders during a crisis, and the existing crisis in Haiti and elsewhere will create a handy pool of desperate young men with no prospects to man the raiding parties. The US regime has already let one caribean island nation disintegrate into nightmarish chaos while hardly lifting a finger to help, and they're going to be stretched thin just staying in power, so don't expect any help from them.
So I'd have to ask just how you plan on being careful who you 'let in'? Do you have the capacity to repel organized armed incursions? Does whatever political structure is in control of whatever tools of violent resistance exist have the coherence and balls to effectively act in an emergency situation, and do the people executing their orders have adequate training for heavy combat in a complex situation? I'm just not seeing any way for the 'escape to an isolated island' strategy to play out effectively in a global collapse scenario.
We do have huge amounts of ocean with good fishing.
Bad news about that. The worldwide fishing yields are currently crashing because of global overexploitation and heavy damaging of oceans.
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/end-of-l ... hout-fish/
Besides, even before that, are fish yields high enough to feed everyone on the island if food imports are severely curtailed? And if they are, won't such a rich resource invite agressive neighbors to sieze control over it?
To the extent that free markets are allowed to operate I think things will adapt to a dead dollar very quickly.
Perhaps - but what would things be like after they adapted? The fundamentally weak structure of the economy wouldn't be changed, a huge amount of wealth would have been destroyed, governments and enterprises bankrupted and livlihoods destroyed, agriculture destroyed, citizens disenfranchised and impoverished, transportation almost unaffordable, manufacturing destroyed. The authoritarian regimes all over the world, including the US, will use the chaos to sieze further political control. Chronic low-level warfare will have spread over large swaths of inhabited territory, and numerous major cities will have been partly abandoned.
But the stock market might come back a little and gold will be worth a shitload if you can keep hold of it, so yeah, I guess you could call that 'adaptation'.
If you have resources you can hire people to help with security. I think we have extra food to where we could pay someone a #10 can of food to act as a guard for the day.
That doesn't strike me as a well-thought-out plan. How long will you have extra food without a sustainable local food source? Do you think you collectively have the skills and resources needed to effectively raise, arm, train, regulate, and direct an armed militia? Also, what is stopping the armed militia, if you raised one, from simply appropriating the resources you're using to pay them? Historically this is the common outcome of using mercenaries.
I would love to have a floating house and have actually spent a bunch of time thinking of designs and testing out models in the ocean to see how they work. I was planning this for years from now but sometimes wonder about trying to do it sooner.
A floating house would only work if it somehow had a sustainable onboard food, water, and fuel supply. Otherwise it'd be a death trap.
Piracy seems to only really be a problem because most ships are not allowed to carry even one gun.
Wellll, there are different kinds of piracy. Somali piracy is driven primarily out of desire for cash, so they seize commercial ships that have the ability to pay. They have plenty of potential targets, so they avoid armed ships just like wolves avoid taking healthy prey.
Piracy in the western hemisphere after a hyperinflationary global financial collapse would probably have different, more visceral drivers, like the need to secure food, water, and security for oneself and one's family and kin. Desperate people are far less likely to retreat in the face of opposition, especially if they're armed, organized, prepared for a struggle, and willing to be ruthless. These are problems that are too complex to solve by firing a few warning shots.
So yeah. I don't mean to be a buzzkill or anything, but I'm just saying that if you're right about the impending collapse of the dollar, and I think you are, I can't see any way to avoid going through a very dangerous period of serious social disruption, as John and others have discussed somewhat. A tropical island with low potable water supplies, no arable land, dense population, proximity to potentially agressive neighbors, interruptable communications with sources of vital supplies, and minimal organized capacity for self-defense will necessarily be a vary marginal location for survival purposes. You might want to look at a backup plan.
