I'll eat my hat, Simon Black, if "the Zimbabwe scenario occurs" or Texas attempts to secede because we're all desperate for their oil to sell to - well, who? I asked the Texas question because it is a bad question - because a positive answer indicates to me a distorted sense of the composition of American society.

America's wealth isn't the dollar's reserve currency status, it isn't its GDP (or conversely the debt-to-GDP measure), it is ~400 million humans and the natural wealth of the richest part of North America, combined with the easy geopolitical security of two vast oceans and two good friends. Our debt is made easier because of the strength of the dollar, just as the British debt was before the Suez crisis. But it is secured by our vast real estate, our technologically sophisticated economy, and, like all national debts, by the easy assumption of future growth in population and economy (this growth being the main reason the national debt is not analogous to household debt).