“American families are leaving dysfunctional cities such as New York City, Seattle and San Francisco and heading for Montana, Colorado, Maine and upstate New York in the Catskill Mountains among other safe havens.
Big cities have always offered a trade-off between higher taxes and urban stress in exchange for entertainment, great restaurants, museums and intellectual buzz.
Today the venues and buzz are gone, the crime rates are soaring and all that is left is the stress and taxes. So people are getting out.
Changes like this are not temporary. Once people move out, they don’t return ever. Their children may return someday but that could be 15 or 20 years away.
And those who leave tend to have the most capital and the most talent. This leaves the cities as empty shells populated by oligarchs with personal bodyguards and the poor, who have to deal with the street-level violence.
This shift can be helpful for individuals who move, but it’s devastating for the economics of major cities. And that’s devastating for the U.S. economy as a whole.” – Jim Rickards, in The Daily Reckoning
Still needs a hair cut. Been in the business of scaring people to sell gold too long to be heeded.
I am not saying closed Bank of America branches in my area don’t make me nervous. Frankly, the banks will probably puke. (Highly technical economic term.) However we should have girded our finances against such a contingency months and years ago. That being said I will probably pick up an ounce or two even at a higher price.