All the money that was somehow in process in the computer systems of the government and private banks simply ceased to exist because of electromagnetic disruption or, in the case of Washington, permanent and total destruction. That was about one dollar in ten, but it was all hypercritical money, because it was in motion.
It was the liquid cash, what people were using to pay other people.
The other thing that happened was that records were thrown into chaos. Records that had survived, but only on magnetic media, might as well have been destroyed because they couldn’t be read.
The destruction of the computers was exactly like the failure of a nervous system in a body. All of a sudden there were no messages getting through. The body lost contact with itself. Storage companies such as the Iron Mountain Group preserved a great deal of data in underground facilities. Without the machines stored underground, as a matter of fact, there wouldn’t have been a single functional computer left in the United States after Warday. The wisdom of those storage and preservation programs is now obvious. Without them, for example, there couldn’t have been the gold distribution of ’90. Even so, most people had only about fourteen percent of the dollar value of their prewar cash holdings restored.
Between the cash lost in transit and the inaccessible records, we were out about three dollars in ten. The collapse of Social Security, Medicaid, and the whole federal entitlement system meant another two dollars gone when those checks stopped arriving from Washington. The loss of the rest of the federal budget was another dollar gone. In a few hours the cash economy of this country was more than cut in half.
And there was more to come, of course. This sudden loss of cash meant that thousands of banks and businesses were bankrupt. But they were also without the means to communicate, or the records to communicate about. So people didn’t get paid, or if they did, the banks couldn’t cash their checks, and the next thing we knew, most nonessential businesses were shutting down.
Add to that the complete anarchy that reigned in the stock market, with people frantic to escape New York City and the electronic records in mayhem and the sell orders roaring in—it meant the end of Wall Street, essentially.
The next thing was the calling in of loans by foreign banks. In the mad scramble to leave the dollar, the whole delicate Eurocurrency market trembled and then collapsed.
By this point the state of the world monetary system made the Great Depression look positively healthy.
It will take years to recover. It’s a funny thing that before the war the great economic bugaboo was inflation. God knows, deflation can be worse. Money’s so damned hard to get because there’s so little of it around. I’d rather work an hour for twenty inflated dollars than a day for fifty deflated cents! And in terms of buying power per hour worked, we Americans are operating at about a sixth of the prewar efficiency level, meaning it takes six times as long as it did before the war to earn the same amount of buying power.
You’d better believe that goes for economists, too!
I was vacationing on St. Bart’s on Warday. I’d been there for three days and planned to stay another eleven. A few days after the war, the police rounded up all the tourists and put us aboard a passing cruise ship, the Canberra. There was a great deal of trouble. The Canberra wasn’t prepared to take on over a thousand extra passengers. The first thing that happened that made this feel like a war was that a man refused to leave the police launch he was in. He said he had rights; he had prepaid his vacation. The police threw him into the water and sailed off.
That, more than anything, brought home to me the fact that the world had changed. We were not affected by EMP, so we still had radios. We were glued to them, listening mostly to the BBC. There was this curious, terrifying silence across most of the dial. The United States was silent. Cuba was silent. The BBC reported massive fires in New York and Washington, and said that flights from England had been forced to return without landing because of unsettled conditions in other American cities.
My daughter was in school at Colgate. My wife was at our home in New York. At that time I was working for the Chase Econometric Institute, forecasting flow of money, which is my specialty. I had taken some time off to be alone and to think about the consequences of the massive IMF refunding that had been proposed the week before by the Saudis. This was critical to Chase because it affected the viability of our Nigerian loans, and thus our whole African exposure. Not only that, our failure to support the proposal could call into question our relationship with the Saudis.
But with free-market oil soft at twenty-two dollars, and the Mexican and Brazilian debt moratoriums creating cash-flow problems for the bank, we were concerned that we would not be able to sustain the additional loan demand the refunding would create.
So I was alone on an island with my computer and all the data I needed, quietly developing flow analyses and projections based on various cash/loan levels.
I never dreamed that the bank I worked for was about to become a part of history, and the computer I worked with worth considerably more than its weight in gold. My initial concern was just to get home. I kept thinking, standing at the rail of the Canberra on that warm October afternoon, feeling the reassuring hum of the ship beneath my feet, of my wife and daughter and that measured BBC voice saying, “New York is burning”. For some reason I just assumed the Russians had won. I felt that as an employee of a capitalist bank, I would not have much of a future.
I don’t want to go into my whole life story over the past five years. Suffice to say that it has been sad in some ways, but in others lucky. I have been preserved from the suffering and upheaval that have blighted so many lives. Of course, I lost my wife and daughter, but since I met Quinn here in San Francisco, I have found that I can contend with the hollowness inside me, and the awful sense of having deserted them. Quinn hasn’t been successful in finding them. In looking for them I found her, I guess.
The Canberra eventually docked at New Orleans. Since the war, I have not gone north of Atlanta. I put my name in the Red Cross National Finders, but nothing ever came of it. And of course, Quinn’s scoured the earth. Even so, I still look at the lists every month, when they post them in the Student Union. But Berkeley is a world away from the war.
Hell. I’m a goddamn coward, is what I am. My little girl could be anywhere and I’m afraid to go look for her. I’m so scared of radiation. Even while it’s killing you, you don’t know it’s there. I wake up in the night when the wind blows down from the mountains, thinking maybe some microscopic bit of plutonium from the Dakotas has found its way here, and is aiming for my lungs. I get these weird, nonspecific sicknesses. So I go to the Medical Center and they tell me I’m fine. Once I heard them showing a man on triage how to manage lung cancer by breathing steam!
I went to a psychologist. I went to an osteopath. I went to a witch.
Now listen, I’m really getting off on a personal tangent. I think in a sense that I’ve developed the habit of being a patient. Half the world is starving and I’m worried about my own damn guilt trip.
This interview method is cunning. You guys find the people who want to talk, don’t you, and then just let ’em rip. Get a man’s secrets right on disk.
What are you, a couple of State Intelligence or MI-5 types?
We’ve got both around Berkeley, believe me. The British are good friends to this country. The best friends. But they are also very interested in using the current crisis to solidify their international position, shall we say.
One thing I’m sure of. There will never be another United States as free, as powerful, as magnificent as there was before.
From a statistical standpoint, we regressed too far. Now outsiders can control how much reconstruction we do of our technological base industries, and thus make sure we stay just far enough behind not to be a threat. The tendency of Japan and Europe is to look upon the U.S. and Russia as two countries that went kind of mad. By 1980 or ’81, both nations were effectively insane. The acces
sion of Reagan the actor and Andropov the human computer were the first sure symptoms of the war madness, according to the poolside theories of my friend Dr. Hideo Hayakawa, who is a psychopolitical theorist.
We have about a hundred and seventy-five million people in this country, and the death rate still exceeds the viable birth rate by two to one. So we’ve had a net loss of fifty-five million people.
That’s twenty million births and seventy-five million actual deaths.
We have lost as many people as there are in England. Yet look at the English. They’re all over the place. Two thousand British bureaucrats are running this country through the blind of the Relief, which is really a colonial government disguised as a sort of Red Cross with teeth. The provisional U.S. government in L.A. is gaining strength every day, but so far it’s mostly paperwork and planning.
The Capital Replacement Program, where the government prints money to replace the capital of corporations that lost it in the banking catastrophe, has been effective here in California, but so far it hasn’t spread beyond the borders. Thus we’re dealing with a three-percent inflation rate out here, which is really only reflation of the deflated currency, while the rest of the country is still deflating.
I recall my own personal sense of panic when I discovered that I had no money. None. Even my MasterCard was meaningless. My bank account was simply another lost record among billions of lost records. Our economy was electronically erased, really.
One of the great acts of economic heroism—which, as usual, nobody outside the profession understands at all—was the creation of the Gold Tier in the currency. Barker Findlay, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, is responsible for that idea. If he hadn’t been in Atlanta on Warday—if he had been in Washington—I hate to think about it.
We have experienced an economic situation with no known parallels. We’ve been in uncharted territory. At home we had dollar deflation due to scarcity, while abroad our currency was becoming as worthless as if it had inflated itself out of existence. So you had a situation where a house in the States might cost a thousand dollars, while in Italy, say, a thousand dollars wouldn’t buy a cup of coffee. This has hurt trade very badly. If it weren’t for the gold, we’d be dead in the water as a trading nation. But we’re doing pretty well—and out here on the Coast we’re beginning actually to thrive—because we’ve been able to pay in gold for foreign products. By the time the gold gives out, it’s to be hoped that we’ll have enough independent production to be able to offer goods for trade.
What we are doing is supporting ourselves on gold transfers to foreign companies. The National Mint in Atlanta makes all those beautiful double eagles we send abroad in return for the few and astronomically overpriced televisions and radios and computers the colonial powers will send us.
Around the economics faculty here, it’s popular to say that the undamaged powers need our markets. The hell they do. You didn’t see Belgium developing the Congo. They do not need our markets, they need our resources, and they will encourage American economic development just enough to get our agricultural system running on a stable base, and then they will put the brakes on.
Our First World friends want to develop their own technological economy without reference to us. They want America to be an agricultural nation. We supply the corn and wheat and soybeans and they give us an occasional stripped Toyota. And yet, we have the plant and equipment here. Detroit is three-fourths idle, but it didn’t get bombed. And EMP did not damage it that much. You can build cars without computers. Hell, we did just fine at it, right up until the seventies. So why aren’t the plants in Detroit running?
Oh, I’ll grant the flow from American plants out here on the Coast, but look at the cars—a mess. Plastic doors, for God’s sake. Look at the difference between a Chevy Consensus and, for example, a Leyland Star or a Toyota. It’s ridiculous. We don’t even have any chrome! And yet a Consensus costs more than a Toyota! You can get a Toyota 4xD Timbre for thirty gold dollars, but no paper currency accepted. A Consensus costs three thousand one hundred paper. With a hundred paper to one gold, that’s still a hundred dollars more for far less car. Of course, if you’re like most people, you can’t get gold to buy a Toyota, so you end up with the Consensus.
Now let’s see. What haven’t I covered? Ah yes, debt. The federal debt, of course, has ceased to exist, largely because of the failure of so many records. And the moratorium on remaining prewar debt will be made permanent within the year, in my opinion. Or at least restructured to new dollars. I mean, you can’t expect a man who earns a thousand dollars a year to pay off a hundred-thousand-dollar mortgage, can you? That would have to be pared down at least ten times. Besides, it’s unfair to a man whose debt records survived to penalize him with responsibility for them when another man, whose records were lost, gets off scot-free.
I wish you guys would talk to me. I know I agreed to do this solo, but I’m really very uncomfortable with two heavily disguised roadies sitting across from me with a very expensive-looking disk recorder, no matter if you’re Quinn’s friends or not. I don’t know what I’ve been saying. Maybe I’ve been a bit subversive. The British have been a tremendous help to us. So have the other Europeans. And the Japanese. I think we would have gone back to the barter level without access to their technology and services, and our economic efficiency would have declined too far to enable us to adjust to the continuing condemnation of farmland in the Midwest.
Famine would have become a permanent institution. And, just for the record, I adore California and if anything I may have said implied otherwise, it was a misstatement.
I think I can lay my hands on some figures. Yes—these come from the U.S. Census Bureau, by the way, the Statistical Abstract of the United States, extrapolated to 1991 from original 1987 data, and taking into account war damage.
First, to say that nobody understood the effects of EMP would be superfluous now. We lost, in about three seconds, approximately a hundred and fifty million television sets; five hundred million radios; ten million computers; three hundred million electronic calculating devices; fifty-six million electronic telephones; all television, radio, and microwave relay stations; all electronic business exchanges, such as stock and commodity exchanges; millions of electronic automobile ignitions; most electronically dependent aircraft, either crashed or permanently disabled; all communications satellites, either traversing or in geostationary orbit above the United States, Canada, and the USSR; and something on the order of two hundred trillion pieces of information held in computers.
The war burned down the electronic village, is what it did. What we had not understood was that our financial system depended on that village. All of our destinies were contained in fragile electronic superbrains, and so we have been deprived of destinies. I guess that’s the real point of war, isn’t it? To create intolerable deprivations and induce deaths.
Since the war we’ve been like a great lobotomized beast, flopping and struggling in the trackless void, unable to control or comprehend even the smallest shred of its own destiny.
After 1983 the government and many private companies began shielding against the highest level of EMP pulse they could, without spending intolerable sums. That was fifty to a hundred thousand megavolts, depending on the type of system being shielded.
So the Russians simply used larger bombs and tripled the power of the EMP pulse generated. A few extra warheads made billions and billions of dollars’ worth of shielding useless.
Because of the ease with which the pulse strength can be increased, EMP shielding is essentially impossible without a vast amount of investment and effort.
Before Warday, we were living in a dream world.
Christ, sometimes I think I’ll get up and just walk into the river. Thinking about what mayhem our little bitty nuclear war caused makes me crazy. For example, there’s this extraordinary place down the Coast. I know people who’ve been there. Undreamed-of technologies! A European preserve of ultimate luxury.
Shuttles to luxurious space stations we are told nothing about A new world, and we are being left out of it. I know people who say they’ve seen that port. Somewhere between here and Baja, I don’t know where. They want to send us back to the Stone Age so they can have the stars to themselves.
Oh no, that’s paranoia. Rumors. I doubt that the Europeans even have any space shuttles. They suffered too, economically.
I hear about this European plan to create zones in the United States. A British Zone, a German Zone, and so forth. I know that the federal government in L.A. is opposed to that sort of thing. But there’s never anything about forming a second Continental Congress and appointing a new electoral college. Or elections. They say we’re too electronically disorganized. The last time this nation had a population of a hundred and seventy-five million was 1955, and we managed to vote quite well then without computers. We had no four-lane interstate highway system then, but we traveled freely, and we had a thriving steel industry, a thriving auto industry, a powerful military, a strong and effective government, and a reasonably content population. Remember the Eisenhower years? You guys must have been kids then. There was no sense of dislocation. Not like now.
Of course, there’s the fact that we’ve had a war. But now these little European states are trying to tie down the giant with a million threads! After World War II, Germany and Japan were far more devastated than we are now, but we poured on the aid and they revived.
Oh, what the hell. You can’t blame them for being fed up with superpowers. All they probably want is to see the U.S. broken up into a number of small, independent nations. Can’t blame them, damn it.
You know, the problem with being a person like me, at the center of a big university economics department, is that I get too much low-grade information. Although I must say one thing, the British have been very free and open with their statistics. Also, we are beginning to see real bureaucratic reorganization in the U.S. government.
Warday Page 18