>I received this real email from a very good friend. What do you guys think?
>
>"Fox is saying if they don't come up with a plan by Monday, we could experience a financial disaster. I think you should go at lunch and get all but a couple dollars out of your account. I would hate for you to lose any. Call your company and ask them is it too late for them to mail you your check instead of depositing it into your account."

Do that, and then convert your money into something whose value does not depend on the U.S. Dollar!

Seriously, I have no way to evaluate the seriousness of the current financial disaster. Fluctuations. Whatever.

There have been cases where people could not get at the money in their bank, except for small amounts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corralito - and it is probably this that the e-mail is alluding to. Note that the money did not completely lose its value - but people could not get at it.

Then, there were cases where money lost its value almost entirely. For example, here in Bolivia, within 2-3 years (ending in 1985), the exchange rate for the U.S. Dollar changed from about 25 pesos to about a million pesos. It must have been around that time that people started to do transactions, price quotes, work contracts, etc. in U.S. Dollars - which at that time was trusted as a stable currency. (It isn't now - banks and similar institutions are starting to offer accounts in Euros and in UFV, which is a sort of inflation-adjusted boliviano.)