Everyone should be making intelligent preparations.

The fact is that the US has been running a massive debt Ponzi and all the signs now point to it reaching toward the end.  I'm on record that in predicting that 2017 is the year of real pain when it all collapses but we should expect to see the cracks widening until then.  This article dives into the details for those who are fascinated with trivia but I think that wise people will prefer my actionable high level abstraction: 

• It's s debt Ponzi which will collapse at some point because Ponzis are pyramid schemes and pyramid schemes don't plateau.
• Ponzis often seem workable right up until the bottom falls out.  If you didn't learn that from Madoff you have your head in the sand.  Note that Madoff, after getting caught, warned that the whole government was running a Ponzi.  I find that people with nothing left to lose by telling the truth are generally pretty credible.
• It's global.  Everyone will be affected everywhere.
• The bubble is the biggest financial bubble in the history of the planet.  Expect the reversion to the mean to be very, very mean.  Unemployment will skyrocket to 40% in the US (it was "only" 25% during the great depression).
• It will turn into every man for himself.  People will disrupt the system on purpose in order to prove how they are so important that they should get special treatment:
• Police, fire, truckers, port workers (this is happening already), rail workers and other infrastructure support people will demand that everyone else let them keep status quo even though everyone else is in collapse.  Of course, it will not work, it will just make a smaller pie for everyone to fight over.
• Many will turn to crime.  They will justify stealing the food out of your mouth and that of your children so that they can feed their own.  They will also hurt and kill with the same justification.  Liberals who put their faith in government and who backed the socialist movement will be the worst offenders.  Fear them if you see them after the collapse because they might look normal on the outside but inside they think only of themselves to the extreme.
• There will be shortages.  Gas, food, etc.  Prices for these things will rise right along with a thriving black market in the US.
• Government, which caused all of this in the first place with its treasonous fake money supply, will try to assume the role of benevolent protector.  It will pick winners and losers.  It will anoint friends and attack political enemies not with words but with deadly force.

These are the things to consider, not the details of just how bad it has gotten.  Those details are just a distraction.  They are the heat being turned up slowly.  By talking about the problems in a growing sense it gives false hope to herd members who believe that if everyone knows about the problems that someone will eventually fix them.  So we get all of these partial truths without anyone ever saying the obvious truth that it is a debt Ponzi and that it cannot be saved and that it was in fact engineered to hurt us.  You can debate the "why" of it all day long but the "what" is now beyond question to any thinking person.

The main take away is not to fear it.  Fear is the enemy because it stops people from thinking straight, developing a plan, and taking action.  Screw fear.  When the shit hits the fan, I am the one to be feared by anyone who attempts to attack me because I am prepared logistically and mentally.  All I can do is warn people and since it sounds "over the top" to do so before the collapse is obvious I consider it an act of charity.  After all, why should I take the rolling of eyes for any other reason?  I get literally nothing from doing this work.  So take it for what it is worth but if you don't take action for yourself while it is still possible then don't blame anyone for your plight later on.  You have been warned too many times for you to reasonably say that you had no idea of what was possible or even probable to occur in the coming years.