Reply #19: Your conclusion is essentially correct but you take an indefensible way of getting there

[ThomWV]

The dollar isn't crumbling because of the oil economy and its traditional trade in dollars. The dollar is crumbling because those who hold our debt are coming around to understand that we have no way to repay it.

In the end a country can only repay its debt from one or a combination of three sources. It can dip into its gold reserves to pay its debt. Unfortunately our gold reserves are less than 1/100th of our debt so after we hand it over in its entirety we still owe. The second thing a country can use to pay off its debt is the future work of its people. Basically people will work and earn for years to come and much of what they earn will be used to repay the debt (taxes will be collected and the revenue from those taxes will service the interest due on the debt). Unfortunately we have lost much of our production capacity and more importantly we have a dumbed down workforce that knows little and came make even less. Thus we are no longer seen as the innovate Americans, but more like the ignorant Americans and in no case are we the ones who can earn enough to repay our debt. Finally a country can sell off its natural resources. We have coal, but then so does most of the rest of the world, we have oil, but not enough for our own consumption at current rates let alone enough to export for debit repayment money. We have uranium, but not a lot of it, we already import much of our natural gas from Canada, so that one is out too. What we have to export is agricultural products. You think food prices are high now, just wait and see where they are headed. It may surprise you to learn that while Ireland's people were starving to death as a result of the potato famine the country was a net exporter of food. The rich sold the food as the poor starved - think it can't happen here?

Anyway the world has come to figure out that we are a piss poor credit risk. Nobody in their right mind will be in any hurry to take on any more of our IOUs, and that creates one monster of a problem.