While his prediction of economic disaster is possibly correct, his solution is flawed. He makes no distinction between the international behavior of the US dollar and the national behavior of the dollar. In practice they are like two different currencies.
Even if every other country on the world stops backing our gigantic debts, all this means is that the price of *imports* will jump. But what does this mean, really? If the price of carrots from Mexico become $30 a pound, but the price of carrots from California remain $1.50 a pound, whose carrots are you going to buy?
But the rest of the world can stamp its feet all it wants. If it gets too aggressive, the the US could just default on its national debt. The end result would be about the same, that is, imports would dry up.
Now, he is correct that the government may try hanky-panky like having bank holidays. However, this only works if you keep all of your money in the bank—something I don’t recommend for anyone right now. Instead, if you keep a few thousand dollars of cash at home, in a safe place, it is safe from the hornswagglers.
And if they go hog wild, with massive inflation and nonsense like that, individual States, cities, and even cooperatives of the people can just issue “scrip”, which is an alternative currency. As long as everybody agrees to use it, the US government can go pound sand. Scrip is legal, even if it isn’t legal tender, and some cities used it during the Great Depression, which made their life easier.
The author is wrong about something else, as well. The US is only a net importer of *specialty* foods. We produce way more staple foods than we consume, and many other nations are reliant on us for them.
Food is something we have in abundance, as well as housing, and police and military security. With those three things, we are well situated to weather an awful lot of problems.
Sure, things can get tight for a while. But W. Bush filled up the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve to 98% full, and if congress will just lighten up (under threat of torches and pitchforks), and lets the oil industry do its job, then we will have plenty oil for what we want to do.
This is off the mark. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is sized to run the Navy and Air Force for a short while. There's no way we can draw enough oil from that for our trucks and cars until we can draw oil from the new wells & new pipelines.
There are oil wells off CA that were capped when they shut down off-shore production. These might be brought on line quickly.
However, regardless of where the oil comes from, we are likely to pay market rate for it, unless you are thinking of expropriating private property. If you think anybody will sell oil in the USA at $30/barrel when the international market is paying $300, you are nuts.
The same goes for carrots. If carrots are $1.50 a pound here, but $30 a pound in Mexico, the US farmers will be shipping all their carrots to Mexico.
And if you think tariffs are going to help, you are insane. The only way to dig ourselves out of such a hole is to start making or growing things the world wants and selling them at the world price. Otherwise, you'll just have the Chinese buying the stuff cheap, and shipping it out of that California port they bought, and earning the difference between $1.50 carrots and the world price.