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Listen, all you Chickens Little, even during the Depression — when the US economy arguably collapsed — there was food, there was fuel, there was order.

Nothing is going to “collapse” the economy — or civilization — absent plague, nuclear holocaust, or world war. In short, the end of the world.

And a Bible VIP says anyone who says they can predict that is an idiot.

You give excellent advice and points. This charlatan is giving bad advice based on ‘headline’ scare-talk.

Yes, there are risks. Every day there is something out there that could make the market go down. There is mixed bag of news - oil up too high, consumer confidence down too low, etc. But we move along.

“Listen, all you Chickens Little, even during the Depression — when the US economy arguably collapsed — there was food, there was fuel, there was order.”

There was also jobs, with 80% of people working, there was investments, in fact great companies that endure today were good buys then, precisely because it was hard times.

The people that got hurt most were those who bought at the top on margin and got wiped out as the stock market fell by 90%.

If you have a balanced bond/stock portfolio that is well-diversified, keep ready money for emergencies, and are frugal and stay out of debt and not to extended in your lifestyle (eg dont buy a house that you lose to foreclosure in the event you get a pay cut etc), you can survive ‘hard times’.

And if you get to the bottom - check your last penny and what’s written on it ... IN GOD WE TRUST. Put your trust in the Lord and the vagaries of human experience will be of no large concern.

Listen, all you Chickens Little, even during the Depression — when the US economy arguably collapsed — there was food, there was fuel, there was order.

Nothing is going to “collapse” the economy — or civilization — absent plague, nuclear holocaust, or world war. In short, the end of the world.

While you may be right that everything won't collapse, you are ignoring several important things. First, the Great Depression was not an economic collapse. It was not, actually, that severe a depression, by historical standards. So using that as a worst case scenario is misleading.

More importantly, the world has changed dramatically since the 1930s. Since you mentioned food, look at the difference in food distribution between then, and now. Then, most individuals had a sizable amount of raw food on hand. I have seen guesstimates that 6 months or so was the norm. Now, that number is measured in days (2 weeks at most). But it is not just households. The typical can of green beans would have been years old before the 1930s consumer bought it. It would have spent those years in storage, somewhere. Now, the can of green beans that you buy today is only weeks old. What this means is that at any given point in time, there was a huge amount of food sitting out there, in the pipeline, so to speak, waiting to be bought. Today, that stockpile of food is essentially non-existent.

And the same pattern is true in just about every industry, from food production, to the manufacture of widgets. This means that there is no stockpile of stuff "out there", on either a personal level, nor in the economy, to provide supply during a full economic collapse.

Society has evolved, especially over the last 40 years, in response to the massive changes in production, delivery, and finances. Maybe none of this matters, in the end. But if there is a full economic collapse (not like what we saw in the 30s), it is fairly easy to see how most of society would fall apart almost immediately.

And "order"? If food supply is disrupted (which would happen almost immediately, in the case of a full-blown credit crisis), the food would run out in NYC within days. While I have enormous respect for the police, the idea that order would be maintained is simply unrealistic.