Bug Out Bag Essentials for Reasonably Rational People

>"In the 1990s, the Argentine peso was pegged to the U.S. dollar. That meant the Argentine government guaranteed that you could always change one Argentine peso for one U.S. dollar. If you had 1,000 Argentine pesos in your bank account, you could walk into the bank and ask for $1,000 U.S. dollars and they’d hand it over.

By 2001, the peg had become unsustainable for a number of reasons and the government of Argentina abandoned it. As a result, the exchange rate went into freefall.

Imagine if you looked at your bank account and the value had gone down by 75 percent over the course of a year and you hadn’t spent a dime of it. That’s effectively what happened in Argentina.

In less than a year, the exchange rate went from 1:1 to 4:1. If you had US$10,000 worth of pesos in your bank account in 2001, a year later you would have had only US$2,500.

Attempts to withdraw U.S. dollars as the exchange rate plummeted were thwarted for most citizens, because the run on the bank (where everyone tries to take their money out at the same time) meant there were no U.S. dollars left to hand out.

Mimi told me she slept outside the bank for a week to no avail. 75 percent of her life savings disappeared. The same happened to others, and crime increased. To add insult to injury, she had to install bars over her windows to prevent her house from being robbed like many others in the neighborhood were."