- Assume everything will be fine and America will remain a global economic superpower.
- Plan an exit to a more serious, stable country.
- Some option in the middle of the two to hedge your bets?
You theoretically lose yield compared to the S&P average - but if you're hedging your bets against the US possibly going to shit - the S&P is unlikely to perform as well as its historic average IFF that scenario unfolds.
Seems like a better hedge than gold, but my crystal ball isn't working.
Shorter term, we need to rotate investments out of USD.
There are two obvious problems with exiting to a more stable country: (1) we'd be putting ourselves on the business end of a large gun being held by a madman (2) when things really hit the fan, will it actually be more stable for American expats?
I saw the writing on the wall long ago. I predicted all of this happening many years ago. I left the US back in 2015.
Currently in the UK, and I hope to eventually get dual citizenship. My partner is European, so that is possible too.
Thatcher: bad Invasion of Iraq: bad Brexit: bad Human Challenge Trials: good Free Speech: bad Too many immigrants: bad Revolving cascade of PMs who can’t get anything done: bad
Listing out a few - I guess I appreciate the Covid stuff. Hmm. still on the whole, I would be in the green longterm shorting everything about the UK.
The most interesting cultural export is Bonnie Blue (sign of decline).
I mostly like the US but the years since Obama have been rough
I have a feeling there may be more changes coming due to the rush of applicants, but they are incredibly unlikely to revoke anyone who successfully applies before that happens.
My main concern is that it might not be far enough away.
My guess is 2/3 of the country at lease believe in that.
> - Plan an exit to a more serious, stable country.
Only the Top 0.1% are eligible. Probably only half of them are prepared. The other half are blind.
> - Some option in the middle of the two to hedge your bets?
That's the same cohort of the half of 0.1%. These people are not betting against the US as much as they are hedging their bets. They'll remain in the US till it's clear that the downward spiral is inevitable.
I’ll wait.
On a serious note;
I’m looking at my billion dollar neighbors and they all just are citizens everywhere now. No allegiance to anything but their own pleasure.
Salaries in tech sector still give you higher overall quality of life than most of US can ever offer. Then you have - extremely beautiful nature at your doorstep, more top notch destinations like Italy and France just at the border, very low criminality compared to US, very good free healthcare, very good free education including top notch public universities, very well functioning social programs. One doesn't have to be ashamed their taxes go to killing innocent civilians half around the world (although at this point US population including folks here seems fine with that). And so on and on and on.
Also, you don't spend your whole active life getting it and (almost) burning out for that, 40h/week and then you can live your life and chase dreams and passions.
Quite a few swiss residents would be happy to have this (or at least some more cost control).
There's mandatory health insurance with preexisting condition coverage, but it's not free (tho it's partially tax supported, depending on location and income).
Argentina and Brazil are about the only other countries where you can almost get away with this and legalize your existence (Argentina in particular has constitution that says essentially if you survive 2 years, you are basically citizen) , although most of Africa wouldn't bother to enforce it (South Africa in particular has almost as much illegal immigration per capita as USA although with a wide band of possible error in estimates, and they can't meaningfully enforce it).
Otherwise you need investments (usually 50k+), permanent pension, top-tier education, a professional job offer, cultural/family ties, or connections with the political apparatus. Switzerland in particular is on extreme hard mode for a non-EU citizen to get citizenship.
American citizens generally do not think that they can just walk into another country and settle there, because you can't do that in the USA. A big part of what got Trump elected was that people just about everywhere, except the left wing of the political spectrum, were concerned about the scale of unauthorized immigration during the Biden administration. That does include a huge amount of asylum seekers under various programs, but even just CBP parolees at the southwest border totaled over 1.1 million July 2023 - July 2024 and that is a shitton of people (https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/08/21/u-...).
Also the USA has a literally 250 year tradition of people moving here (and an equally long tradition of fretting over how the "wrong" people are moving here). The entire history of the country is: people moved here and never stopped moving here, and along the way most of the native population were killed or exterminated by disease. You make it sound like some ill-founded 20th century liberalism run amok.
If anything, modern Europeans are too accustomed to people not migrating around. But it's worth remembering just how much migration (within and from without) had to happen before the modern European socio-ethnic layout emerged.
Chinahhhh.
Uh, anywhere that hasn't collapsed?
Also, Canada. They're likely to withstand global warming better than most of the world, and would be comparatively easy to adapt to. If I didn't own a house, I'd already be working to move there, though I have recent ancestry that makes it a relatively more appealing option.
It's not likely at all if you've looked at the polls for France, Germany, the UK and Spain, and how those have been trending over the last decade.
But that is just a guess on what OP means.
New Zealand is really nice. So is Australia with free electricity.
Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Finland are all great. Iceland I want to live in.
Good friends live the simple life in Costa Rica and love it.
Canada has a much better quality of life, but it’s probably a bit close if the US melts.
There are a lot of options
Investment wise they are doing well.
They often own multiple homes.
They are not “smart” if they think a civil war will go down.. that’s poorly read people imo, sentiment pushed by the group that lost elections. And sooo context unaware. Could these people name any politics outside the US? Nope. Clueless, which is why they lost the election.
Some very smart friends are making investments in SA irt building factories.
And that's exactly what the question was.
You seem to consider yourself in the "smart people" ranks, so what's your big plan for adaptability?
I'm almost 50 and mostly retired except for work I like doing (producing musical events or performing).
About the time my kiddo graduated high school, I moved to a rural area far from cities, and about 18 months ago I bought some land that had primitive shacks on it.
I spend a lot of time reading history. I assume that the US fails eventually;
not because I have any illusions about surviving that house fire, have a lack of awareness of the mass death that would cause, or fantasies about how I'd be able to function in some post-US world.
That assumption comes out of watching the capitalists strip the wiring from the walls of US soft power along side watching the fact that it's 85 degrees in March at 6500 feet here... "climate isn't weather" is true, but I'm not an idiot and we didn't have a real winter this year.
The failure of the US is terrifying, not because I and my community would mourn the loss of some glorious and benevolent order, but in the way that the death of my estranged parents was terrifying:
we are no longer doing things because we're forced by the fantasy of belonging to some larger political order, but now have to choose what to do.
Having read a lot about what the US has done in the world, I believe that a) it's unethical/racist/genocidal / exploitative in almost all its actions and b) I think the only actual hope for climate change is the end of the US as a world order. I don't know if the end of that order is sufficient to fix the ecosystem, which I feel is on the verge of some calamitous changes, but it certainly seems necessary.
Not having control over that failing system, and not having a lot of fantasies about belonging to the polis associated with that system, it's perhaps easier for me to look at its failure modes more clinically than I might have when I was 25 and saw it as an impenetrable solid face; I've moved downstream from Fisher's statement, and now it's much easier to see a possibility for the end of capitalism (or at least the uni-polar US world order) than the end of the world itself.
Not that it's the actions of a bunch of angry and over-educated leftists who would bring it about, but as has always been understood by Marxists (among whom I do not count myself), the failure leading to its dissolution are the inherent contradictions of capitalism itself.
Which makes me feel amazingly hopeful, actually. I don't have any real political power (beyond my affinity group), so it's nice to know (like Duncan instead of MacBeth) that these things could maybe take care of themselves without me doing anything I don't find ethical.
Because I believe that there is a future for humans, I spend a lot of time organizing with folks even when I think the short-term goals aren't super useful: for instance, doing ICE Watch support with local folks, shooting a lot of guns with folks who understood the wisdom of John Brown, or just being available to help out folks who have politics oriented around direct action.
I have been spending most of my time clearing the scrub oak from various parts of the land where I live to make the wildland fire interface a little less terrifying. I build a pretty sturdy solar power system here. I've spent the last couple of months getting my head into programming the esp32 and its peripherals. I got a ham license and have been working on building radio systems. Hopefully I will figure out how to get an underground cistern next month, and then act on the septic permit I got last year.
Other than that, I assume that things aren't going to change much in my life time... I just sit here in my shack playing banjo and hoping for the best.
Prognostication should be illegal and all, but I suspect that Trump will probably kick off in 6 months from a stroke, the Dems will elect Newsom, and then they won't do a damn thing to change anything, and we will be fighting the facists under worse conditions when they finally find a pretty face to solidify them.
So I look forward to dying of Super Ebola-fluenza at age 65 in the middle of a mid-June snow-hurricane near Bluff, UT while supporting a bunch of anarchist 30 year-olds in a drone-powered trench line while they fight the "Western Slope Fascist Front". But I bet I'll still be driving my Tacoma to that battle...