Within the US, the Northwest is a popular haven for survivalists due to its environment and population density. Oregon, more specifically. Idaho has it’s own but they tend to be overly religious and a little weird, IMO
Outside of US, New Zealand is a popular get away as well as certain locales in South America. A good friend of mine is married to a Peruvian woman and they are going to pick up a piece of land down their this summer. It’s been reported in a South American news paper that the Bush family bought a 100K acre ranch in Uruguay.
Mad Max is not an appropriate analogy. Think more “Children of Men” in the short term. Extremely high unemployment and the wealthy barricaded in certain areas with a very brutal government. They have been modifying and creating laws for the last 8 years to deal with this sort of thing. The Bill of Rights is no longer valid legally and certain privacy eroding laws will ensure that no dissent will be allowed.
This collapse should start accelerating here in the spring-summer with a lot of high profile BKs and very high unemployment numbers. I’d say by this time next years we won’t recognize our country.
Looking around the world it’s pretty easy to see that there is a immense amount of inertia in the east to start currencies backed by something and Rumor has it they will be launched by early 2010. The time frames are rumors the mass intention is not. I recommend to anybody that they should read Putin’s speech from Davos. It’s quite enlightening.
The whole western financial system is insolvent and the baltic and eastern european states are about to start defaulting and our biggest banks are about to be nationalized, which really is not really what nationalizing is about this is more a dump the junk on America move. If everybody has not noticed no matter how much money we give the banks it does not solve the problem.
Right now, it looks like our officials are faking it. It’s not hard to see that the economy that we have been dependent of for the last 35 years is not going to be possible anymore. The FIRE economy is going to be a fraction of what it was and all the service and retail that is supported is going away. I’d expect GM to go down pretty soon which makes certain portions of the midwest a wasteland. In Detroit the average home cost about 18K. Combine this with a general shrinkage in all other sections and I’d put unemployment 25-35% by mid-late 2010. Supposedly 1 in 9 Americans are on food stamps right now and unemployment is already close to 14% according to the un-scrubbed government numbers. They do keep two sets of books and only release the scrubbed numbers as official.
