If the United States goes broke our money would become worthless right? How can someone protect themselves just in case this happens? Keep a stash of Gold or money from other countries? Please, no "The US will not fail" answers, this is just a curious what-if scenario question. Any country can go broke so this doesn’t just involve the US.
The US is already broke. We have been a "debtor nation" since the 1990′s. We owe more money than we have. We owe trillions of dollars to the Chinese, among others. To deal with this, the govt prints more money, which leads to inflation. Right now there’s no inflation, but at some point all this printing of money (not backed by anything) will come due, and inflation will return big-time (like in the 1970s).
Your personal money won’t become totally worthless, but it will buy less and less each year. If the US did a serious devaluation of the dollar, your money could become worth as little as 10% on the dollar. Probably not a realistic probability, though, but a possibility. It’s happened to lots of other countries. Italy, France, Russia to name a very few. Old people’s savings in those countries did become worthless.
What can you do? Nothing. You couldn’t keep enough gold on hand to survive. Plus ordinary people don’t deal in gold in the US (not like countries where women collect gold jewelry as "insurance"), can you see yourself offering gold at the grocery store? Other countries’ currencies is even riskier, because you lose money when you exchange from dollars, and when you change back. Solution? Hope that the govt can get the country back on track so we’re all earning a decent living so we can pay taxes to repay the trillions we owe. Someday. If not, ????
