Investment guru and Gloom Boom & Doom Report publisher Dr. Marc Faber spoke to investors in Asia about what the future may hold:

…Investors, who control billions of dollars of assets, should start considering the effects of more disruptive events than mere market volatility.

“The next war will be a dirty war,” he told fund managers: “What are you going to do when your mobile phone gets shut down or the internet stops working or the city water supplies get poisoned?”

His investment advice, which was the first keynote speech of CLSA’s annual investment forum in Tokyo, included a suggestion that fund managers buy houses in the countryside because it was more likely that violence, biological attack and other acts of a “dirty war” would happen in cities.

He also said that they should consider holding part of their wealth in the form of precious metals “because they can be carried”.

The United States is a fairly large target, and if recent events like Hurricane Katrina are any guide, our local, state and federal governments are anything but prepared to manage a serious, coordinated attack on our homeland. We’re not suggesting that emergency responders would not be willing to help in a disaster, but what  has been made clear is that the bureaucracy surrounding emergency response (i.e. Ray Nagan in New Orleans), will make it quite difficult to get help to those who need it (i.e. three days to get water to the Super Dome).

How difficult would it be to poison our water systems? Or to crash essential  internet services like transportation or payment processing systems?

Our view is that it would not be difficult at all.

Our country is very vulnerable to a variety of attacks and any such attack could cripple the system. How quickly we could recover from such an event would depend on its severity. If a two or three day snow storm in the north east causes people to panic in a grocery store, imagine what would happen if our water systems were poisened or our power grid was attacked.

Things could get really ugly, really quickly.

This is why we recommend that all of our readers have at least a short-term emergency reserve of supplies.

For those who say we’re paranoid or overreacting, we direct you to our government’s very own FEMA web site, which recommends that everyone have a reserve supply of food and water on hand, so we’re pretty sure we’re on to something.