Marvin eyed the news as he sipped coffee at the counter of his favorite diner, sunlight washing across the seats to his right and signaling the birth of a bright new day.
Kristi, the waitress, placed his order in front of him, leaned on the counter, and eyed him. ‘Thoughts, Marv?’ Her voice rattled in that early-morning smoker’s way.
He thought a second, letting the smells from his meal wash over him as the clatter of spatulas on the flattop back in the kitchen offered an offbeat staccato to the rest of the diner’s atmosphere. The crowd had thinned recently. Soaring prices for food and gas had culled the old-timers on a fixed income. Only diehards remained. Only diehards had the currency to spend on a meal and a cup of joe. Today was a ten-year bond auction, so he sat nearest the TV spewing financial jargon.
‘They’re stuck. Inflation is way too high. The only jobs available are part-time or government, and the bond market has been brutal for nearly a year: fat tails everywhere. It’s like an overfed Koi pond. Today could be messy.’
‘I’ll pretend I know what that means,’ Kristi laughed, and then, more seriously, ‘But what can we do?’
‘Physically? Nothing. Just take it like the beating it is. Hodl and all that. Financially, I’d get as much money out as you can. Put it in hard cash, canned or shelf-stable foods, plus gold, silver, and lead. If you can move over to bitcoin, do it. Like now.’
‘I’ve got the bitcoin in cold storage and stack like a pleb every day.’ She threw him a thumbs up before continuing, ‘Try to save my moves to meaningful amounts to control UTXOs. Didn’t know lead was valuable, though.’
‘That’s smart, Kristi. Keep fees as small as possible that way. And the lead, when backed by black powder, is for protecting the gold and silver.’ He raised his coffee cup to her. ‘And yourself, of course.’
She chuckled and nodded, moving down the counter, wiping it as she went, even though customers hadn’t been in those chairs in weeks. At the other end, she talked with another of the scant crowd, and only pieces of the conversation, mixed with the scattered sounds of the kitchen, made it to Marvin. Which was fine. He was here for coffee, eggs, and the strip sausage he could get nowhere else.
So far, the journos offered a litany of what should be interpreted as horrible news but were spinning it like cotton candy into a fluff of gotta-have BS. The fact that they supported valuation at 50-75 times earnings as if it was ordinary betrayed reality and cogent thought. Not an Austrian among them.
Everything shifted after the recent American election cycle. The economy started to groan meaningfully, and ‘soft landing’ seemed akin to slamming a jumbo jet into the side of a mountain. Sure, the politicians would have people believe it’s the other guy’s fault, the other party’s fault, hell, your fault. Anything but their fault. And that sounds nice, except it’s a thought trap inexplicably denying personal responsibility and assuming others are to blame.
Marvin reflected again; he has done that a lot these days. The bond auctions had turned south in a hard way during the previous election cycle. That was before the tails got wonky, like now. The government overhauled all banking charters, completely locking out shareholders and boards. The changes upped the mandates for purchasing bonds and the number of bonds each bank held as a percentage of their assets. The banks chafed, screamed loudly for all to hear, and were ignored by the common man. It appeared that banks had been abusing their authority for so long that the average person thought nothing of a bit of comeuppance in the banking sector. ‘Serves ‘em right,’ most said. Then, the government rewrote all the rules, and nationalized the entire industry. Of course, they didn’t call it that and had stacked the Supreme Court with additional Justices to back their perspective. Make it all legal-like and such.
Marvin had a different view. One that held a little closer to the idea of austerity being the best path forward. The American people, used to largesse, would not go along. They didn’t chafe at the nationalization of banking, after all. The country had morphed into a nation aligned to ‘of the bureaucrats, by the bureaucrats, and for the bureaucrats.’ Maintaining their seat at the table of politics overrode everything. Voters had primarily devolved into an ‘I’m all right, and you’re all wrong’ mindset. Marvin believed that any move by the government to curtail its debt-induced death spiral would come like a bolt of lightning from the clear blue sky. Only the bureaucrats would know, and not even all of them.
Not even most of them.
He had no idea what they would do or how it would go down, but it was coming.
The door creaked behind him, and John, another local who liked the sausage, came in and slid onto the stool next to Marvin. John nodded. ‘Mornin’.’
Marvin raised his glass. ‘Back at ya’, John.’
Kristi set a cup of coffee in front of him and gave him a warm smile. ‘The usual?’
John nodded as she placed the order. Picking up his cup, he held it under his nose and took a deep breath. Without turning, he asked, ‘You still on about financial ruin?’
‘It’s coming, John. Believe it or not, they need to do something. The interest on the debt is nearing TWICE what the country spends on defense. That’s a lot of scratch, and it’s being issued at 1100 basis points on its best day. The FED and Congress are using different playbooks and ignoring the realities each is writing.’
‘Meh, doesn’t matter. We can print all the money we want and can pay that debt off promptly if we want to.’
Marvin shook his head. ‘It’s that kind of thinking that got us into this mess.’
John slapped him on the back. ‘No worries, buddy. It’s all gonna be fine.’
Marvin shrugged. Arguing with a devotee, a nocoiner was pointless. John did well in day trading and taking advantage of the opportunities before him. They’d even shared stock tips and insight over the years. Where Marvin siphoned sums into his bitcoin hard wallets, John had piles of cash sitting in high-interest accounts in the bank. Different banks, of course, something about all the eggs in one basket. Marvin thought the basket was banking, not a bank, but the whole rotten system. In that view, John’s assets were in a single, hole-riddled basket. With a frayed handle. He’d been walloped by the nationalization and got scalped. Now, he had limits on what he could withdraw. He could not pull large sums of his money out if he wanted to or had an emergency. It wasn’t really his anymore. Pulling out his phone, Marvin checked his meager bank account balances and brokerage account. He did his best to keep them at minimal levels. Three months of living expenses for the bank stuff. His brokerage account, his biggest non-bitcoin account, had enough cash for him to roll options and make a little side money. He had his gold and silver coins, too. Along with a fistful of dollars, they were locked away in a gun safe bolted to his basement floor. He had a little cash, too. Most of his worth was in bitcoin, though. He was committed and reviewed his seed phrases mentally to ensure they stayed current in his mind.
He sipped the last of his coffee, watching the financial news pundits talking like the world was okay. Marvin wondered if this was what it felt like for those few people who knew the housing market would collapse in ‘08. All the info was there, but nobody thought anything was wrong. A few diehards and doom and gloomers got it right, though. The public bailed out the too-big-to-fail folks, which was everyone in finance, and the very thought of learning a lesson was overwritten by stupendous sums of cash. Paid for by the children of tomorrow.
Marvin placed cash on the counter under the coffee cup and left for the office. He slapped John on the shoulder, ‘Be careful today. Gonna be messy.’
John grunted, but his order came out, and he was too preoccupied. Marvin got it. The sausage was divine.
By 1 pm, it was apparent that something was horribly wrong in the auction. By 2 pm, the tragedy had unfolded worldwide, and a collapse was underway. Circuit breakers were tripping across all US exchanges as stocks imploded and fell. His phone flashed an alert that the FED had called a meeting with the Treasury department for 4pm. Today. No planning and no waiting around. All hands needed. Then, a follow-up alert told him the President had been notified. That got Marvin’s attention. There was no need to bring the President in. The President knew less than Marvin did about the situation. He opened X and watched the carnage play out across FinTwit. Marvin found Larry, a guru on the bond trade, and read the commentary. The auction hadn’t had one of those wild tails that pushed prices up; it had flat-out gone underfunded. The banks were tapped out and not buying more. The FED was out, too. Other countries got spooked when Americans stopped buying, halting their interest. Failure personified. Calamity had come to knock on the door of the American Dream.
Marvin whistled. ‘Tens of billions short. That’s a lot of scratch.’ Marvin looked up and muttered. ‘They’re gonna smash and grab.’
He leaned forward, logged into his employee account, and took the rest of the day off. This would be an unimaginable problem, and he wanted to be home. On his way, he stopped to pull a little extra cash out of his account and was denied. Funds frozen.
Not to be outdone, he returned to the diner, where Kristi was just finishing her shift. He ordered a burger and handed her his debit card. She looked at him like he was crazy.
‘Yeah, I get it, Kristi, but I want to try something. Run it as debit.’
‘Won’t work. Debit cards have been a problem for about thirty minutes now. Credit, I can do. Debit, no.’
Marvin shook his head. ‘Figures. They are closing access to the banking system and locking Americans out of their money. It’s step one.’
‘John is always on about them printing money to get out,’ Kristi said. ‘Can’t they just do more of that?’
Marvin squared his shoulders. ‘Somebody needs to buy the opposite side. It’s not just a fresh $100 it’s also a fresh $100 IOU. They cancel out and are balanced in that way. The IOU needs to be purchased so the $100 can be spent. Nobody is buying the IOU. Today’s auction failed. Now we have this,’ he waved the useless debit card.
She smiled, ‘Well, you can pay me in bitcoin. I’ll cover the tab in cash from my tips. Girls’ gotta’ earn a living, right?’
Marvin laughed and agreed. He paid in bitcoin. This was one of its use cases.
On his ride home, the news on the radio escalated in pitch. Riots had started in several places. Looting in metropolitan areas was also on the rise. Standard panic moves by worried people. It would get worse, but he was as prepared as he could be. He called John.
‘Hey, buddy, how you holding up?’
‘Not good, Marv. Nearly half of my account holdings are gone and I have zero access.’
‘What do you have on you? You have cash?’
‘Nah. I’m all credit and debit.’
The phone went silent for a moment before John came back, ‘I gotta go man. We have a mob headed our way.’
‘Be safe, John,’ Marvin replied before the line went dead.
Once home, Marvin clicked the TV on and went to the basement to check on his larder. He had foodstuffs for a while. Including nearly 200 pounds of rice. He opened his gun safe and visually verified his home protection collection and ammunition situation. It would have to do. Patting his huge upright freezer, Marvin headed back upstairs. He would be ok.
The news brought him back and Marvin tried to get his head around what would happen next. Demonstrations and a forest of politicos tilting hard again at banks overwhelmed the newsies. Chaos was stirring all of it. Raw information on what happened seemed hard to come by. That would continue. He prepped dinner with the news in the background and waited for the President to speak. He didn’t think it would matter, but it might be enough to quell the riots. The scene cut to the White House and an empty podium. A banner across the screen indicated the President would speak at any moment. He turned up the volume to hear everything but knew he would be reading online afterward to see what the fallout would be. He always wanted to verify.
Marvin’s heart crashed as the President began outlining his plan. By the end, in a sweeping motion to right the ship of state, the government was seizing the monetary assets of its citizens and businesses. In some cases, it had already done so.
Listening, he tried to zero in on the specifics. The politico on the screen was frothing. ‘Unconscionable. How could they think this is even remotely allowable under the law?’
‘But what would you have them do? Austere to the nth degree, this measure is at least slanted toward fair.’
The other newsie pounced again, smashing the news desk with a hand and awash in anger. ‘Fair? Fair to rob the bank accounts of ordinary Americans? Fair to rob them of years of savings? Fair to rip money away from them? How will they pay their bills? What about the savings they’ve made for college or a family vacation? Government seizure is a criminal act.’ The man paused for a quick breath before crashing through more rhetoric. ‘There are plenty of people the government could seize assets from that wouldn’t affect regular working-class Americans. This is a disgrace!’
‘But they did,’ the woman said, repeating part of her early argument.
Marvin sat down and opened his phone. He found his banking app and keyed his access. His account amounts were off. Like the pundits on the TV said, they had been trimmed. Somewhere around ten percent across all of his checking and savings accounts.
They had his attention now.
He checked his brokerage account, and that, too, had a haircut. His cash in the account had been pared back, and his positions had been reduced. Back-of-the-napkin-math told him he had seen roughly a fifteen percent degradation across the trading account. That made sense. He had more money there, and if they used a graduated approach to asset seizure, they would grab more from those with more. It also jived with the newsies. He’d need to do more research; it could be that the government was simply layering in based on tax brackets. He didn’t know.
Last, Marvin opened his bitcoin brokerage. A script ran across the home screen and told him that assets were safe for the moment but that the government had demanded forfeiture of cash deposits on hand. He didn’t have those, but he did keep a small amount of bitcoin on the exchange so he could spend it where he wanted, like with Kristi earlier, without accessing his cold wallets. The brokerage amount seemed secure, but he didn’t trust the government to leave it alone. He spun up a hot wallet with a new address and transferred the bitcoin. The bitcoin transaction worked, but all his efforts to transfer from his bank accounts were useless. He and every other American had been locked away from their money. He would use the hot wallet to supplement the cash he had on hand for the next few days if he needed to spend or buy anything. If he needed that option, there was a bitcoin kiosk machine in the diner. He also knew the cold wallets would be safe. Zero chance the government could do anything about his stash there. And they couldn’t leverage their buy-in on it, either.
Marvin returned to his bedroom, unlocked the nightstand drawer, and pulled out his bedside firearm. He ran a quick service check on the weapon and placed it on his bed. Next, he donned his shoulder holster, tugging the straps to ensure a secure fit. Holstering the weapon, Marvin moved for the door. It wasn’t even five o’clock, and he had a bad feeling about the next few hours. He wanted to put the car in the garage and pull in the garbage cans from the street. He would reduce his outside footprint and hunker down until things settled down.
After finishing the outside chores, Marvin tuned back into what the newsies were saying. It was getting interesting.
All across the country, citizens were rioting. Whole blocks in every major American city were on fire. Fire and police forces tried to stem the tide but were overrun, and now firetrucks were in the hands of rioters and looters. The joyriders pulverized crowds, but it didn’t matter. Nobody was coming to help them anyway. Not anymore.
Marvin sat in the fading light of a dying day and watched the news. The TV scene switched to Philadelphia, the birthplace of American democracy. Drone footage showed the city awash with fire. Across the river, the old battleship New Jersey burned, too, as did most of Camden, New Jersey. In the background, scores of helicopters could be seen approaching, and a winding trail of military vehicles was crawling across the low hills of southeast Pennsylvania. As the sun set, the banner on the TV told him the president had implemented Martial law.