while most of you will react emotionally I can react intellectually there are few things on this world that can cause such a devastating situation 1. natural disaster causes food shortage and chaos 2. complete collapse of the financial system 3. World WAR III number 1 and number 3 don't seem likely at this time But think my ET friends with your pretty little heads, what IF US dollar was suddenly worthless overnight do you really think it can happen to all the other countries but not to Rome oh no nothing ever can happen to Rome think China and its ability to sell the dollar think it CAN NOT happen ??? whole lot of you are just dreamers
Lets see what would happen if china did that. Well since about 20% of all of chinas exports go to the US (and 15% goes to Hong kong which just in turn exports to the US) it would seriously destroy the chinese economy to do that. All those countrys that Rome took over, were not dependent on rome for survival. In fact alot of them were better off without rome financially. If China suddenly could not export 20%+ products...how many 100s of MILLIONs of chinese would be out of a job? Who would support those 100s of millions of people? The chinese government? If you are in business, do you really try to do something to hurt your biggest and best customer? If you sell widgets, would you really stop selling to a guy that buys 20% of your widgets every month because you dont like the color of his money? The US dollar will never become worthless as long as we are the leaders in the worlds technology. Oh and FYI. If the US dollar did become worthless it wouldnt be so bad. If the dollar became worth like 100k dollars to 1 euro, you could easily pay off your mortgage, credit cards, car loan and all of that. Federal deficit would be wiped out overnight, once that is paid off, the government comes in and says "Ok we will issue "New dollars" now and all the people can trade in their "old dollars for new dollars" 1 billion old dollars(because of hyperinflation everyone will be a billionairs) will be able to be traded for 1 new dollar. We have a fresh start, taxes dont need to be so high because we dont have anything to pay off anymore and life is grand. Would only be a few months of turmoil then back to life as normal
At some point, when your best customer owes you a lot, and doesn't pay their bills, and obviously isn't going to, you stop shipment or slow them to the rate they are able to pay at, so at least the debt can't get any higher. That's next, IMO.
What an idiot suggesting that we'd default on our loans. We're perfectly capable of covering our liabilities with our tax revenues. The GDP, after all, is north of $12 trillion and the government gets half. I think I heard we had $10 trillion in debt outstanding, so I doubt that we're like a corporation that can go under. The capitalist society we've built will always be here when it finds that there's a better way of allocating resources as well as a need. It's not really that we have more people or even more resources, we're just better at utilizing our resources and personell. As the previous poster said, we're world leaders in technology, and for good reason.
It's a good point and one that I doubt anyone who says otherwise is capable of understanding. China needs a strong dollar to operate. In fact, the hybrid communist quasi capitalist system over there is dependent upon an abundance of low wage labor jobs to support their system. If we had a weak dollar, we'd just make them over here, but the jobs wouldn't pay as much on a relative basis.