You list is dead-on.
In Ecuador I didn’t see food shortages but since the currency suddenly lost 80 percent of its value, for ordinary people the price of food went up 500 percent.
In Venezuela, when they made scapegoats out of grocery chains, food disappeared off the shelves instantly. The stores couldn’t re-order since they couldn’t charge enough to pay to re-order.
In Ecuador, the grid was always iffy, so all major buildings, stores, malls, upper class homes even, had generators on automatic switches. They would go on and off all day long seamlessly. The reason was, electricity was subsidized and the government wss broke. So, blackouts for the people without backup.
In Caracas water shortages were common and are more common all the time. When you have the president telling you not to take long showers, something is wrong.
As for credit cards, I’ve already mentioned the banks closing for weeks while they re-organized.
Crime? Rioting? Actually, riots were commonplace, organized by the Left to make the country ungovernable. If we crash, you can expect the same thing. The Left will get people whipped into a frenzy in order to take advantage of the situation; probably many of your own kids may get caught up in it. They’ll especially organize thugs from the slums to take out their enemies; when someone needs to be taught a lesson it gets written off as simple street crime.
Average citizens bartering? Absolutely. The underground economy is the real economy after all. During the crash bartering and neighbor helping neighbor is exactly how you get through. And you start your own little handyman service helping your neighbors, who pay you in whatever they have of value. In a crashed economy, again, people become very entrepreneurial.
And, no, the government won’t save you. They are the reason things crashed in the first place. The government is the ultimate prize and there will be constant turmoil as various factions duel for control. If you need help from a government clerk who hasn’t been paid in three months, you need to find another alternative. People who know how to navigate that problem set themselves up in business doing just that. You’ll hire a guy to work the system for you. He knows the right people. After the collapse you’ll need someone like that from time to time.
American after the crash is Third World America. A disfunctional government. A country that works only because of the unofficial economy, and because people learn to do without the disfunctional government. They find work-arounds, they barter, they use foreign currency in place of their own, they work off the books, and families and friends look after one another.
Because ending the freedom of Americans seems to be the lusted for prize of so many non-Americans, if our economy collapses and chaos rises, I fully expect powerful military enemies to take full advantage of our chaos. I will not go into details on an open forum, but suffice it to say those with family in the military need to pray their loved ones are on this continent when the collapse comes. We have a real internal enemy who will not hesitate to strand our military personnel wherever they are deployed. They will be sitting ducks without resupply and possibly dwindling fuel.
Thanks for relaying you experience and your insights. Being prepared is very important.
What happens to things like mortgages? Are foreclosures forced? Or do banks just have “write them off” and prefer an occupied property to an abandoned one subject to vandalization or destruction?