Tucker Carlson says he thinks our system is collapsing in real time. Hard to argue with that. I look at it as a slow slide down an ever steepening slope. Either way, if you look around and pay attention, you can see it happening all around us:
- Crime is increasing and police forces are shrinking.
- Inflation is rising again, and both food and fuel are growing noticeably more expensive.
- The position of the U.S. on the world stage is sinking, being torn down by our bad foreign policy and by aggressive attacks from Russia, China and other outsiders.
- The dollar is growing weaker, in part because we weaponized it, and in part because of resentment from China, Russia, and a few other countries.
- As we are entering Cold War II, World War II looms in Europe and there is talk about Civil War II in the U.S.
- We can no longer trust our chief law enforcement agency, the FBI, or the objectivity of our Attorney General.
- For more than half the country, the Constitution is just an outdated piece of paper.
- Consumer buying power and real income has been dropping since 2020, meaning pay increases are not keeping up with inflation. This has caused more large-scale union strikes than we have seen in decades.
- The Federal deficit keeps rising, our debt keeps growing, and yet we keep spending.
- The government may shut down by the end of the week, yet no one is taking about it.
- Our leaders are elderly, infirm, and increasingly failing. Most people with Alzheimer’s can’t manage their own lives yet we are letting them manage the country?
- Our presidential election may be a rehash of the last election, and chances are, we won’t be able to trust the results of this one, either.
I could go on, but I think you get the picture.
What’s Next?
I expect what pushes the country over the edge from collapsing to collapsed will be a combination of internal and external pressures. We’ve seen this before. For example, President Reagan applied pressure on the Russians by discussing the strategic defense initiative program known as “Star Wars.” In response, they overextended their budget trying to keep up and their economy failed, leading to a collapse of the Soviet Union.
An article in the Wall Street Journal states, “According to Oxford don Robert Service’s exhaustive study of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the decapitation of world communism …the U.S.S.R.’s export revenue was not sufficient to support its crippling defense budget and pay for massive imports of food, while also subsidizing the even more troubled planned economies of restive client states in Eastern Europe. And it could never provide even a token proportion of the consumer goods that the Soviet people knew were routinely available in the West.”
Turning the Tables
If the dollar wasn’t the reserve currency for the world, we would be in the same place. But the opposition is trying to push us toward collapse. Russia and China, working in concert either by intent or coincidence, have turned the tables on us. For example, the U.S. is playing catch up as we don’t have a hypersonic missile. We also may not have enough military might to protect Taiwan and fight in Europe. This time, our economy is failing.
A big difference between now and then is China and Russia are in an even more precarious economic position than we are. If the U.S. collapses and the dollar becomes worthless, those countries—and many others—will be hurt as badly or even worse than the U.S. This explains why both Russia and China are buying gold, stockpiling grain and oil, and working together to stress the U.S. military and our budget. If the world collapses, China and Russia want to rise from the ashes and be the foundation on which the world rebuilds.
A Race to Recover
It’s not a bad plan. They might not even have to fire a single weapon in our direction. Of course, if we don’t collapse quickly enough, an EMP or a nuclear bomb smuggled into New York, Washington, D.C., New Orleans and Los Angeles on container ships would be enough to tip us into an immediate collapse. They could blame North Korea or Iran.
When the dollar collapses, it will cause the collapse of the entire international banking and finance system. Because the world conducts much of its trade in dollars transmitted around the globe by the SWIFT system, a great deal of commerce will collapse when the dollar does. Many country’s reserves are in dollars, meaning they would go up in smoke.
If the dollar-driven financial world collapses, what country or clique of countries will be in charge of rebuilding? Will it be the country that just screwed the world over and destroyed the global currency, or will it be a country with lots of gold, manufacturing capacity, and a good sized military? If there is already a working BRICS financial system in place, then the BRICS will be approached by countries who can no longer send funds through the SWIFT, or borrow money from the IMF, or cash in those U.S. Treasury Bills. China will be the biggest beneficiary, with Russia close behind them. That’s a new world order.
Natural Resources
Without a global currency, countries who have natural resources will recover fastest than those that must import most of their food and oil. Like preppers, countries with stockpile will bounce back fastest because they have oil in the storage tank, coal in the mine, lithium in the ground, steel in the mill, and grain in their fields.
The U.S. could bounce back, but with the dollar worth nothing, how will we pay the refineries to produce gasoline and diesel? How will we pay the farmer to harvest food? Or the truck drivers to deliver it? I doubt they will take some unknown digital currency, but they will take gold. And the U.S. reportedly has 8,000 metric tons of the stuff. We could find ourselves back on the gold standard, and because there is a limited amount of gold, one ounce will buy far more after a collapse than it does today.
Of course, if they nuke New York, some 6,000 tons of gold stored under the Federal Reserve building in Manhattan will either be radioactive or inaccessible, perhaps both.
What’s a Prepper to do?
There is little we can do on a global scale, but as individuals, families and small groups, we can work to survive the collapse and be around for the recovery. That means we must have reserves, just like China does. For me, that’s food, gasoline, firewood, and precious metals, which in my case includes far more brass and lead than gold and silver. Your reserves may vary.
So keep prepping. Find a place to survive, a way to survive, and the gear you need to help you survive. Find some people you can count on, and work together to make sure you won’t starve if the trucks stop rolling. In addition to being prepared, you need to be flexible and able to adapt to changing situations. You need to be able to function if the power goes out, drink if the utilities go down, and stay warm and dry if there is no fuel. Sitting around and feeling sorry for yourself won’t put food in your belly. Work at it, and you and yours may come out of the disaster better than you went into it.
I’m confident things will bounce back. It may take a few years, and those intervening years may have their ups and downs, but a financial collapse is better than a nuclear war or some other catastrophic disaster.
