General Question

john65pennington's avatar

What happens when a city goes bankrupt?

Asked by john65pennington (29273points) October 6th, 2011

I have been thinking about Detroit all day and the number of people leaving, because of the crime and lack of employment. The population of Detroit is less and less each day. Question: what if the City of Detroit declares bankruptcy? Does the State of Michigan come in with dollars to save the city or does it just become a ghost town? Are other cities about to face the same problems?

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6 Answers

silverfly's avatar

The whole world is facing very serious financial issues. Detroit is a symptom. Wall street is a symptom. For too long, we have relied on central economic planning to manage our currency.

You cannot stop this problem by creating more debt and providing more money. Doing so accelerates the problem by devaluing the currency, raising prices, and making people poorer and poorer.

Detroit is nothing. We’re in for much worse because the United States issues the world reserve currency and our central bank only knows how to print money and keep interest rates at artificial levels.

*edit: I guess I didn’t really answer the question. I suppose people start to do what they can to survive if a city goes bankrupt. I’m not certain because I’ve never seen it happen. Hopefully people will band together and help each other rather than turning to civil disobedience and rioting.

zenvelo's avatar

It happened near here in Vallejo CA. It has not been easy; police and fire services have been cut back, roads have deteriorated tremendously. But the city has been able to restructure it’s debt and contracts, forced its creditors to the negotiating table.

Since cities still have taxing authority of some sort, they don’t go out of business, but they dramatically decrease services.

dreamwolf's avatar

It’s youth join the military or gangs.

FrBrown's avatar

More than likely the national or state goverment would step in to help, or Germany would bail them out since the German goverment seems to bail everyone else out instead of helping their own taxpayers

Response moderated (Spam)
Coloma's avatar

Everyone flocks to the hills and invades my space.

Step away from my geese! ;-)

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