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Comment by nathanb | Hacker News Reader

What does it look like when a nation becomes insolvient? How does it affect its citizens? Its public services?

It looks a lot like how Greece was looking a few weeks back. (Probably still is looking in all likely-hood)

Most of the national debt is written off, public services are cut or re-financed through printing money which has the nasty side effect of inflation and then eventually hyperinflation.

Here's some examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Examples_of_hype...

Anybody with personal accounts from Iceland?

Yes. And since I lived in the UK my government impounded Icelandic owned assets up to their value[1] to pay me back my money. Yay for international relations!

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/businesslatestnews/318519...

Yeah. Those were strange times. The PM had the decency to threaten to use anti-terrorism laws against Iceland!

Interestingly, Eurozone members like Greece can't hyperinflate their currency, since members share common currency, but can't simply print it on their own. The worst they can do is default, which would still have a nasty financial domino effect, but it does leave open the possibility of kicking Greece out of the Euro and taking the hit.

I lived in a country with 600-3000% inflation for a few years. The way we stashed was by converting assets to U.S. dollars.

Hope it helps.

People might start bartering, i.e., doing business without involving government-backed currency.

That might happen in a severe deflation. In a (hyper-)inflation I'd expect people to use foreign currencies.

I think Russia went bankrupt in the 90s when communism collapsed. So The IMF forced them to sell of their assets, like gas companies, oil, energy, whatever else. People bought them really cheap and are now billionaires, or as the media is free to call them Russian oligarchs.

It has taken two decades for Russia once again to at least try and act like a super power in the world stage.

As for normal people, well I would suppose they got a bit richer because well they were starving in 1989 when communism collapsed so really things could only get better. But if it happened to a rich country like America then it would probably turn to a second rate country like poor India or Mexico. There would be no cleaner to clean your street to start with...

In Poland before the communism fall there were big inflation - it made all savings worth nothing in a course of a few months (people were saving for kids flats for 10 years, then these savings on bank account were worth 10 times less after a few months - many people still didn't get that money from "flat savings acounts" (ksiazeczka mieszkaniowa) - that money nowadays is less than a few days of work.

But some people had luck - I know family, that bought one family home for credit in 1986, credit was for 30 years. Then, after a few years father went abroad to work a few months for $ (on the farm), then paid the whole credit back for these $.

Of course country had to default eventually, but many people paid their credits that otherways would be paying to this day. So that's one way of profiting from hyperinflation.

All in all it wasn't so bad, people just were using $ or Deutche Marks (it was illegal to own them then, but it was legal to change your $ to polish currency, only change rate was were unjust). So many Polish businessmans started as people illegaly trading $ to zlotys. Crazy times that were, millions laying in the streets.

You're asking about countries that suffered from hyperinflation (US had a hyperinflation before also during the civil war)

here's a popular blog from a citizen currently living in Argentina http://ferfal.blogspot.com/

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