Ryan Broderick
@ryanhatesthis.bsky.socialSo from my uniquely weird perspective after living in the UK through Brexit, being in India during Modi's demonetization, and living in Brazil when the real tanked during the Bolsonaro administration, I can confidentally say that Americans do not and can not understand how bad this is going to be.
Every damned word of this 4-graf brief, except “By WSJ Staff,” should scare the bejeesus out of you this morning. www.wsj.com/livecoverage...
To sort of broadly describe what is about to happen if the Trump admin doesn't reverse course, we are quickly racing towards a world where not only does our money just not work correctly anymore day to day, but the background radiation of a crumbling economy will become impossible to ignore.
After the Brexit referendum, everything in London just got slightly worse. A year or two in, you could feel it. But that's because it took five years for the country to actually leave the EU. We're speedrunning that. In Brazil, prices would change overnight, stores just wouldn't have stuff.
Covering the demonetization experiment in India as a journalist, we spent a day basically trying to get someone to break the equivalent of $50. It took all day and after a couple hours I actually started to feel like a unique form of dread. Like what if your money just suddenly didn't work anymore.
I've seen a lot of Americans sort of saying, "oh it'll be like the Great Depression" or "it'll be like the Great Recession," but the global economy is different now. It's way more connected than it was even in 2008. And we essentially just removed ourselves from it this week and then doubled down.
You can tell yourself things like, "I guess I won't buy stuff anymore," but it's not that simple. If the tariffs stay in place, we're looking at hyperinflation like Argentina experienced last year (didn't go there, but knew people living there). At certain point, money just doesn't work.
This is why any headlines about "de-dollarization" right now should really scare you. Americans have been insulated from the worst of the economic collapses of the 21st century because of the dollar. We are about to find out what it feels like when that's no longer true. bsky.app
even more fun that pretty much all recent examples of countries where money stops working people start using physical US dollars instead. So what physical currency are americans gonna use when dollars stop working?
To be clear, I am not an economist lol, but if you want to feel proactive, I would ask yourself, "what can I go buy right now that I might need that will last for multiple years?" Clothes, electronics, any foreign-made goods, etc. And also ask, "what debt can I pay off?" bsky.app
So uh what should we be doing right now to get ready
I put a lot of the thoughts from this thread in today's Garbage Day. www.garbageday.email
