When you're looking for states that might be in trouble, you're looking for places with certain attributes. For instance, high debt per capita and low per capita income. Add to that low or decreasing populations and a few other metrics and you can get a really good picture of which states will end in the most trouble.

Illinois wouldn't be terribly high on that list. Your best bets for gaming collapses would be places like Rhode Island, Mississippi and Louisiana. In the next tier would be places like Kansas and Alabama. These are the places that I'd wager will have the most trouble in the future.

But I'm not sure how you'd game any of this... because we're talking about States, so bankruptcy protections would work differently.

Illinois has a stronger economy than PR. Illinois's problem is that pensions are underfunded and the state constitution mandates a flat tax. The utter dependence of local gov't on property taxes also doesn't help

First, you'd need the Illinois legislature to stop arguing and navel-gazing about the long-standing budget impasse and actually do something about it, for better or for worse.

This seems unlikely.