Anyone who has taken notice of world events in the last 5 years from the total failure of the globalist banking system (which only can survive through the trickery of creating vast sums of fiat money out of thin air via the electronic printing press) to the bail in (a euphemism for direct theft) of folks pensions and savings or the deliberate deflationary policy to slowly steal wealth of large sections of middle class society to the deliberate transfer of private elite debt to the future generations of taxpayers and the government dependency for vast numbers to even survive through electronic food rationing policies will of course lead to the inevitable of payment default where exponentially increasing national debt occurs, would have of course realized that there will be a time to prepare for catastrophic economic events that could occur very quickly. The chaos could be even more momentous than the break up and economic event that was the demise of the Soviet Union Empire.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051100709638419.html

Or to sum up, folks have had 5 years to prepare to pay off their debts, have 6 months of storable food available, to have enough cash on hand to pay their way for 12 months and have transferred their fiat electronic savings assets into physical survival assets. i.e. having $5000 in a bank account that could evaporate overnight could be better served as a 3KW solar PV array on the roof.