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.

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.

It’s youth join the military or gangs.

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

Everyone flocks to the hills and invades my space.

Step away from my geese! ;-)