O.K., unlike a lot of people, I do NOT believe that what is coming up will be either transient or localised. I will explain WHY I believe these things and that will also explain how, I think, this thing will be going down.
Whether oil supply collapses first or fiat currency collapses first really has no bearing on the matter at hand. WHY?? Because once one goes ... the other will be days, at most weeks, behind it in collapsing.
If oil supply collapses first, so that they cannot truck any food/supplies to your local area, then there will be nothing to buy with any money that you DO have.
If money collapses first, then you won't be able to afford anything that they do truck in, and they won't truck anything in anyway as the fuel to truck it would be too expensive.
Hence, it really doesn't matter which way around it happens because once either of them gets a foothold, the other will collapse without its support.
Let's understand this .... EVERYWHERE in the world relies on stuff trucked in from elsewhere. There is absolutely nowhere, except in some tiny muscle-powered rural communities, that will not have MAJOR impacts felt from the loss of contact with the outside world.
Have a quick look around your house and see how many things are trucked in from outside. Most food is produced a LONG way from wherever you are. Indeed a lot of it is grown/produced overseas. Your food is grown in another area, your water comes from somewhere else, your energy is produced outside your local area, your sewerage goes to another place to be processed,
What does any of this have to do with whether it will be transitory or localised?
The answer is quite simple. Transitory means that it will pass fairly quickly ... let's assume that up to 10 years is still classed as transitory. Our infrastructure has been built up over hundreds of years and, once it fails, it is going to take a long time to rebuild it. Maybe, not necessarily, as long as it took us to build it in the first time but it will be a LONG time. Once it collapses, it will also lose us a LOT of skills that are now reasonably common.
For example, engineers will not be able to build things without power and power tools. They aren't trained that way. Electricians will not be able to build things without electricity to run them. Builders will not be able to build without power and all of their materials trucked in from outside. All of the training that our current professionals have is geared to our current infrastructure ... this means that, without the infrastructure to support them, they will be as good as useless. After a LONG period of instability ... will any of those trained individuals still be alive? Old age, environmental factors, lack of skills use, will mean that there will be very few left with any sort of skills that can be used to build a NEW civilisation. This means that we will probably have to learn our way back up from whatever level we fall to.
Localised is also easy to refute. We have just established that, virtually, nowhere in the world can survive without outside help. This means that EVERY area that collapses will affect a great number of areas that rely on whatever they produce in that area. This will cause those areas to collapse which, in turn, will cause other areas to collapse. The domino, or snowball, effect WILL ensure that this collapse is NOT localised.
Sometimes the snowball effect can work in reverse as well. The fact that one area produces an item means that, if the places that it supplies those items to collapses, then the area will have no-one to sell to. It works in both directions. The lack of production can affect supplies to an area and the lack of markets to supply to can affect production. Remember this two way nature when trying to foresee what areas are going to affect which other areas.
Next, I'll take a quick look at what level I see as probable before I go onto where we can bug out to and then back on to food.
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