Really impressing.... looking at Venezuela I think the western world still can go on like this for decades... People who look at the statistics and economic developments say, that everyone should be panicking already for the last 10 years, as the developments were and are not sustainable.
The everyday-guy matters when it comes to Armageddon
Everything can be screwed up under the hood it will not cause the panic until the normal everyday guy starts to care and starts to look under the hood and understand the broken reality.
Right now he would have to understand how the system works... for the moment he only sees that the pensions are still being paid and that he can buy everything he wants at the supermarket, hell yeah, he even gets his electronic food stamp card refilled on time. The banks open still each day their beautiful branches in the best parts of town and let everybody withdraw their cash when they want to. Normal people do not understand shit regarding balance sheets and economic cycles...
But the thing is... Venezuela shows us, that even if he would not get his Cheetos and toilet paper, like in Venezuela, with a 12 USD monthly salary, he still would not leave the country or yell in the streets until the government changes their policy. I mean, the guy in the video had 30 relatives who had been kidnapped lately... while he was visiting Caracas his cousin was kidnapped as well... and people still stay there!! They could be killed... if the ransom is not being paid in a week or two the kidnappers there usually kill their victim...
And stuff is a lot cheaper in the western world than in Venezuela in the black (free, not regulated) market... For a monthly salary you can buy 2 packages of diapers. So everybody kidnaps everybody... for a 500 USD ransom or something like that... if they do not know that your family has more... in such cases prepare to pay a 100 times or whatever more... As a foreigner it must be extremely dangerous to visit that country.
I would say Venezuela should be empty by now... I mean, I would leave everything behind and just escape to Colombia if I were them. It might be that they hate Colombia, but they would not have to learn even another language. But if they chose to they could go to Brazil easily as well. Gas is almost free and nearly everybody has a car. At the border there are no checks at all regarding passports Visas and so on.
Japan
Or take Japan as another example... in 2011 I said to myself, the country is fucked... I would not want to live somewhere where I would have to do radiation checks on everything I eat... or worry that something worse happens the next day because of an earthquake with another nuclear plant.
Russian President Putin even offered Siberia to Japanese emigrants. I mean even he thought that this could be the end for that country. Having a 300% debt to GDP ratio, as a young person I would not like to make long term plans in that country for that reason alone.
In Japan they can never buy a home, or even if they could they would have to fear rising interest rates or a new radiation incident. And even nobody knows where the melted cores of Fukushima are.
The Japanese population belong to the brightest people the world has to offer, brighter than their counterparts in the western world... but at least they still have radioactive food and water to eat and radioactive toilet paper to clean their a...... Something Venezuelans lack at the moment and would love to have.
Conclusion
So seeing these examples of Venezuela and Japan, I think that with all the craziness regarding refugees, censorship, central banks financing governments through money printing and so on, we still could be 20 years away from a complete and utter collapse... it might sound unbelievable, but it took 20 years to put Venezuela into this situation. And a large chunk of the population (the majority) still stands behind their president and do not leave the country. And western countries have not yet expropriated all of the entrepreneurs and companies like Chavez did. The entrepreneurs of the western world still are in their countries trying to keep their companies alive... so perhaps I should add another 10 years until armageddon?? We would look at 30 years total...
I saw this great snippet of a visit to Venezuela:
