[quote=davefairtex]Perhaps the gang in charge will try these confiscation-based solutions first - the ones I'm seeing play out in Europe - and once they don't work out, as a last resort they end up gold-backing the currency in a mutual devaluation. But the winners and losers in this devaluation scheme suggests to me, this happens over the cold, dead, bodies of the elite debtholders and the bankers.
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This sort of analysis (both the podcast and DaveFT et alia) is why I'm still here, like…5 years on? (woah…five years!)
The way I see it, there is no one monolithic gang in charge. Certainly there is a class of moneyed, connected uber-rich, and there is also the class of those at the top of the central banking cartel[s], and the corporatist elite, and so forth. There are connections between the various groups, and in many ways their interests overlap.
But I believe that among all the groups at the top who run the show, there are factions with different beliefs about how to play the game. It seems likely to me that the various buy-ins and other manipulations we have seen (Greece, Cyprus) are test runs – experiments, if you will. We are so far out on the limb, so deeply into terra incognita, that I'd bet the folks at the top have a certain sense of "Well, what the !#$%& do we try now?" I expect we'll see more experiments as time goes on, one of which might be something along the lines Rubino posits (the quasi-"jubilee" you mention).
The folks at the top have to countenance civil unrest if their efforts result in catastrophic outcomes (food/gas lines, etc.), and I may be whistling past the graveyard but I reckon that's their last, least-wanted scenario. So they'll try everything else before running the ship up on the rocks (at which point only the folks at the top will have access to the financial lifeboats).
In the meantime, I'm trying to stay flexible with my meager savings and preps (although in the latter department, I'm ahead of 99.9% of the US population, I believe). I will, over the next six months, be attempting a stupefying feat of prestidigitation in terms of my living and working situation – so any major upheaval during that time will be heinously annoying inasmuch as it'd likely scotch my grand plan. But I do have a Plan E waiting in the wings if Plan D comes a cropper (I have already run through Plans A, B & C in the last three years [wry grin]).
Hele on, and VIVA! – Sager