Shenandoah

by John Galt

November 29, 2009

Thou commandest me to lead forth this people; and thou dost not let me know whom thou wilt send with me, especially whereas thou hast said: I know thee by name, and thou hast found favour in my sight

Exodus 33:12

35:31. And hath filled him with the spirit of God, with wisdom and understanding, and knowledge, and all learning,

35:32. To devise and to work in gold and silver and brass,

The reality of the crisis will soon sink in on the American public in this portion of the story. The portion below is FICTION and I have not entered this section in italics at the request of several readers who have difficulty reading the font in that style.

February 24, 2010 05:18 A.M.

So sue me. This time I hit the snooze button twice. I decided I would head over to the office today to see if the owner had sobered up and elected to give it a try. My wife begged me to stay home claiming the news was filled with stories of muggings, hijackings of trucks and robberies everywhere but I knew that was not the case in our little part of Florida, not yet at least. I calmed her down as I shaved by saying “Look, if it is dangerous looking outside, I will turn back home. I will carry my pistol and call you when I get to the office. Heck honey, I have no idea if we are even going to be open but we have to try to get the business moving again.”  She just shook her head and looked at me with those sad, sultry blue eyes and wanted to cry as she tends to do when the stress levels max out. I reassured her by saying “Don’t worry, the 12 gauge is loaded beside the computer desk in my office. I promise to call you on a regular basis, at least once an hour.”

As I put an extra magazine for my pistol in my briefcase, I turned to more important issues, like wondering just how the circus would get restarted after they shut it down cold with no warning. My company was obligated to fifteen construction projects throughout the state, about twenty percent of our former volume three years ago. The problem we had been experiencing with spare parts delivery on the big equipment had dragged on and on with excuses and little resolution in sight as the suppliers kept going bankrupt or endured transportation breakdowns.  I never would forget the article on the cover of Business Week  from the first of this month titled “The Death of J.I.T.” and laughed because they had no idea that the problems they wrote about had been ongoing for almost a year before. The funny thing is nobody noticed any problems until a local super market ran out of Raisin Bran for a week and that was just a little over ten days ago.  Now on the local news program on 820 I listen to every morning here’s a local politician stirring up everyone with the warning that shortages are going to be pervasive in our state and soon if the government does not get the banks and credit systems open. “No duh” I thought to myself.

After shaving and listening to all of the depressing local news, I figured I might as well turn the television on and see what the financial networks had to report. I was too tired and depressed by this point in time to visit the internet blogs, message boards and news sites so  I figured the cheery voices on CNBC, FBN or Bloomberg would have some sort of news, anything to give me a clue. Heck, it was a quarter until six in the morning and usually the networks had the biggest stock pumpers in the world on, but that would be sort of a moot point now.

As I settled in front of the television, the media attempted to portray things in a most interesting twist as I attempted to enjoy my coffee with a bagel. The first thing I saw on CNBC was a new feature titled “Investing in the New America” which caught my eye and made me ill all at the same time. Then as I switched over to Fox Business their feature a few minutes later was “A New Day for American Business” that finished my appetite off, but intrigued me enough to watch the feature to see what in the world was going through their minds.  At just before six o’clock I switched over to Bloomberg for some sort of sanity.  Sadly, it became apparent to me that when sanity left the building, it took our entire world with it. “Dawn of A New America” was the graphic emblazoned on the screen with the Third Movement to Dvorak’s New World Symphony blaring in the background and with my mouth dropping to my knees it seemed, on came a new group of talking heads that I had never seen on Bloomberg before nor would I have ever expected to based on what they said next.

“Good Morning! This is Sandra Williams with my co-host Tom Lewis and welcome to the new Dawn of American Business brought to you exclusively on Bloomberg Television in the United States, CNBC U.S., and the Fox Business Network every morning from 6 A.M. until 9 A.M. when the networks resume with their normal line up. This service is a joint effort between the cable news and broadcasters of the United States  designed to insure that important information about America’s economy, government and regulatory agencies are brought to you unfiltered as a service of the United States Department of the Treasury and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. We are part of a new special reporting group from the United States Information Agency designed to keep Americans and the world informed during this  brief economic crisis.”

My charming wife walked in the room in time to yell at me “I’m not cleaning up that coffee spill on the sofa, you have to do that yourself and do you realize that you’re drooling? What in the world has gotten into you?” She was right of course as I had basically drooled and spilled coffee on my chin, my shirt and the sofa in stunned amazement to what I had just heard. Then after pointing to the television and explaining what I had just heard, she sat down with me to watch a bit more of this stunning first in American broadcasting.

February 24, 2010 06:19 A.M.

The talking heads basically did recaps of everything we already knew to this point but started to add some information to fill in the blanks. The target date for re-opening the entire United States banking system was now March 15th and that could not be good for the financial system but as the announcers stated, the bad institutions would be absorbed and liquidated as necessary and that had introduced inherent instability and the concerns of bank runs as many other commentators had alluded to. Before I could say a word, an advertisement appeared for the new “$ Card” which appeared to be a slick add to push a new government sponsored credit card. In reality it was something more insidious as the ad finished with the slogan “Standby for instructions tomorrow February 25th on how to obtain and use your Dollar Card, soon to be the only legally accetable method for transferring funds from failed banks and travel overseas.”

Travel overseas? What was wrong with Travelers checks or credit cards? This is getting weirder by the minute. The ads that followed were no less uncomfortable to view as my wife and I sat dumbfounded and fixated at the screen.

- An ad from Chase telling all of its cardholders to hang in there as it would soon have a 0.0% interest rate in exchange for the new per usage fees approved by the Federal Reserve and to check our mail for further instructions.

-An ad from Ameritrade assuring its customers that the impending regulations would guarantee the value of their account as of February 19, 2010 and not to sell or panic when financial markets re-open on March 8th but to be comforted by this new government guarantee under the SIPC, now a part of the Federal Reserve Economic Security Division.

-An ad from Goldman Sachs assuring all of the customers who the Federal Reserve and FDIC that are assigned to their supervision that business will return to normal soon enough and to smile at the new dawn in America.

-An ad from FEMA urging all Americans in need to register for help by February 28th so an assessment of the economic crisis and needs of its citizens can be completed as soon as possible.

My wife was shaken by this and puzzled just looking at me and uttering “Dollar Card?” with a very puzzled look on her face. “Got me,” I replied “I’ve never heard of such a thing.” She then begged me again to not go to work and stay home but I would have none of it. It was just after six thirty in the morning and I had to leave. As I tucked my cell phone into my pocket and made sure my CCW permit was in my wallet, I kissed her on the cheek, told her how much I loved her and headed out the door. Work had to be beckoning me by now and with all of the efforts by the Obama administration, some semblance of normalcy had to be on the horizon. “Yeah, right” I thought to myself. There was never to be a normal anything for the rest of our lives the way I figured it. The morning news was only a hint of the insanity to come.

February 24, 2010 07:05 A.M.

As I pulled my F-150 into the driveway of our offices, I slowed down to a crawl and almost broke down in tears. There was a Sheriff’s office squad car sitting at the end of the driveway blocking the way, a fire truck spraying water on some smoldering rubble and what appeared to be a van from the Arson squad or Coroner’s office around the back of the fire truck as it was too far away for me to see at the moment. “Halt right there!” the deputy bellowed out, hand on his sidearm with the holster unsnapped and his other hand making a stopping motion, “Identify yourself and state your business.” I squinted through the windshield and rolled my window down “Doug, is that you? What the hell are you doing here? And what happened to my company’s offices?” Doug, a fifteen year veteran of the Sheriff’s office and long time friend and partner in my bowling league looked relieved. Doug’s voice was shaking as he told me”John, good to see that it is you. We’ve had reports of looter’s trying to get in here and mess up our crime scene. I guess we won’t be bowling again any time soon since the team sponsor was found dead inside of his own building.”

I turned my truck’s engine off and stepped slowly outside of the vehicle, somewhat in shock. “Doug, uh, wh, wha, what happened?” I stuttered choked up trying to ask the question without losing it. The deputy took a sip of coffee from the cup on his squad car and took a deep breath to reply, “John, it appears now per the coroner and arson investigator to be suicide. The initial report has him going inside the office some time last night, pouring an accelerant on the floors, turning off the fire suppression system and setting the building on fire while he was in it.  They’ll conduct an autopsy this afternoon. Do you have any idea why he would do this?” I must have freaked my friend out a bit as he had never seen me shaking like this as he put his hand on my shoulder in an attempt to reassure me. “Oh God Doug, he kept talking about leaving it all yesterday on the golf course as we played through but I thought he was talking about leaving town. I had no idea he meant this!” I told him slowly, my voice low and shaking. “That’s okay John, he was in a world of trouble,” Doug said in a sympathetic voice, “He was on the list of tax evaders to be arrested later this week and I think he knew it. All debtors to the Federal government who had failed to file the proper forms by December 31st of last year were going to get a visit soon. The events of the past twenty-four hours have just accelerated the process.”

I just looked at him and nodded as if to understand what he was saying and as I began to ask another question he interrupted and shocked me with “John, you’re not carrying today are you?”  I looked him in the eyes and said “Of course I am Doug. You know the way things are today, I would not leave home without it.” He shook his head and firmly advised me “Look, we’ve know each other for years. I’m letting you go straight home but do not get caught by another officer again on the streets with your weapon. They will confiscate it now. Only Federal, State and Local authorities are allowed to be out in public armed for the next sixty days and that edict will become public at 9 a.m. when the President issues a series of Executive Orders we have been advised on already. Go home. Tune into the news and watch what they tell you to do. I’m being generous another officer will not be as nice.”

With that, I shook his hand, told him if there was anything I could do to call me and he promised to call me tomorrow night when his eight hour off shift began. He had been on the eight on, eight off shift now since six o’clock Monday morning and it was wearing on him. I thanked him and headed straight home, dying to know the new orders and laws of our President which apparently suspended our CCW rights among many other things. It was seven thirty-five in the morning, leaving me plenty of time to make it and start securing our home a bit more than I had previously.  I called my wife and told her what had happened and she burst into tears, crying over and over again the words “Why, damnit, why?”

Why indeed.

February 24, 2010 07:35 A.M. Central Time

Mike had been up for three hours now and thankfully it was a quiet night for once. The National Guard had set up a roadblock on I-94 up by the North Dakota border to slow down the troublemakers and the punks who were trying to hijack the trucker screaming into the C.B. radio yesterday had been captured, well, two alive that is, and taken into state police custody.  As Mike walked into the house he stomped the frost and muddy ice off of his boots before removing the layers of winter clothes when his wife yelled out “Breakfast honey, eggs, bacon and toast the way you like it!”  Mike was somewhat tired after two days of adventure and keeping that truck and reefer ready to go should his company ever figure out how to pay him back and keep his unit fueled up yet relieved to be home where he could protect his wife and insure the safety of this little farm he had acquired after years of hard work and honest living. “Honest living, huh” he thought to himself as the radio began blaring with the local host saying “Buckle up America, the ride is about to begin. This is KBRF 1250 AM turning programing over now to the USIA and the Dawn in America program with important information from now until the President’s briefing at 8 A.M. central.”

Mike looked at his wife and said it as plainly as us Midwesteners could: “What the hell is this crap?” With that his wife started to tear up and Mike said quickly “No, No, No honey, not the breakfast, this crap on the radio! I’m sorry, I know you’ve been stressed out!” She whipped back at him with that ‘eye’ that men fear and said “Well now mister, that’s better. You know I’m stressed out too. I’ve been bottling and canning and filling up water jugs and sandbags working my butt off with you side by side. And you have YET to explain to me as to why we are doing all this!” Mike assumed the whipped puppy dog position his face staring down into the egg yolk and replied politely “I think we’ll know in about twenty minutes sweetie. Sorry I snapped at you.” She nodded, hugged him and then walked into the living room to settle down in front of the television to find some sort of coverage as to what was going on.

“Mike” she yelled out emphatically, “You won’t believe this. This Dawn in America stuff is on every channel, even ESPN and the Weather Channel!” He couldn’t resist the chance to lighten the mood and yelled back “HBO Latino and The Playboy Channel too?” That triggered the classic “Very funny mister, get your tail in here after you clean the dishes up after breakfast, now I’m worried!” she yelled back. Just as Mike finished breakfast and started to wash his plate the doorbell rang. “I’ve got it his wife yelled” and before Mike could yell “NO” and grab his shotgun she had opened the front door. “Mike, don’t shoot, it’s me Jack” and sure enough it was Deputy Monckton shaking snow and ice off of his coat in the entry way to the home. “Jack, are you nuts? Aren’t you supposed to be on duty now?” Mike asked. The deputy explained that his shift ended at eight and he wanted to watch the big announcement because as he put it “the life of the Sheriff’s department is going to get rough” with what ever the President said. “Have a seat over there, Jack, do you need some coffee?” Mike’s wife asked politely. Jack nodded and asked for black with sugar and she headed off to the kitchen. It was now 7:50 A.M. and the anticipation was building but the disgust for the almost comic like happiness on the teleivsion started to upset Mike and Jack. “Sounds a lot like the AFRTS crap from ‘Nam, doesn’t it Jack?” Mike asked. Deputy Monckton bristled and started a diatribe about how every time they lied to them in the field about how wonderful things were they got into the fire fight of their lives. Then he said something profound to Mike that he and his wife had never considered; that the fire fight was about to begin again because these clowns didn’t have a clue what they were doing.

February 24, 2010 8:55 A.M.

Tom woke up with his wife Sandy to find that she had elected to go to her Mom’s and check on her this morning and would come home some time this afternoon. Normally Tom would not be alarmed by this fact except that he had just heard that the Executive Orders were about to be issued and somewhat panic stricken his mind started to race. “What if they set up road blocks? What if she’s driving drunk? She didn’t take my car I hope. What if she didn’t check her gas? Oh now, does she have enough cash? Oh God, what do I do if she’s in trouble? What do I do?”

Not being the advanced planner he thought he was, he grabbed the phone only to find out it was dead. “Oh my God, the government has cut the lines. They are coming to get me. What did I say on the message board. Did I offend a Fed? Oh Lordy, what did I do?” and as Tom was hyperventilating into the moment his cell phone rang.  It was his wife who started rambling “Honey, it’s me, Sandy. I had to go check on momma as this snow storm was a shocker this morning. It’s pretty but some idiot hit the phone pole by our house so we haven’t had phones since about 5 a.m. I didn’t want to wake you up but I’m heading over to Peachtree City to check on her while the roads are good and before they freeze up.” Tom sensing a bit of relief then realizing she was miles away said in an urgent tone “Be careful sweetie, who knows what kind of nutcases are out there.” Sandy told him to quit being a worry wart and they said good-bye right at one minute until nine. “Crap, the TV” Tom yelled and ran to grab the remote and turn on CNN for the news.

February 24, 2010 9 A.M. ET

Twenty Minutes that Would Rock The World

President Obama approached the podium with Treasury Secretary Geithner, Senator Harry Reid, and Majority Leader Pelosi and began to speak:

“My fellow Americans, citizens of the world, today we embark on a New Day of Economic Justice for All. The imbalances which have destroyed our current system of banking will be corrected to a large degree during the next thirty days. This briefing is for the purpose of informing the public via the United States Treasury Department of what actions we have taken immediately to assure the world and our citizens that this government will fulfill its obligations in full and that all citizens entitled to benefits and assistance from this nation will receive them uninterrupted. With that in mind, here is Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner to outline the executive orders that went into effect at midnight last night and with the assistance of the Legislative Branches, represented by Senator Reid and Majority Leader Pelosi, how we will come into compliance with the new regulatory oversight our nation has agreed to.”

As Secretary Geithner shook Obama’s hand and walked up to the podium, Tom, Mike, Jack and John all had the same feeling despite being miles apart and different in every aspect of their status in society. Geithner began reciting the orders which impacted his department, primarily in the banking and financial sectors but curiously leaving out the enforcement responsibilities of the IRS and ATF as to allow Americans a sense of calm. The feeling of unease the gentlemen felt at home would be amplified in the next twenty-four hours as the publication of the Executive Orders on the Internet and the resulting chaos that ensued would change America forever.

Security for Liberty for All (The Day The Dollar Died Part VII) by John Galt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at johngaltfla.com.
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by John Galt

November 27, 2009

Needless to say on this day of eating, giving thanks and eating, we were all getting fatter, dumber and happier while the rest of the world chugged on and announced their problems into the vacuum of the American financial media. Well, the Internet has guaranteed this void has been filled and the news is disturbing. I’m going to post two charts that tell the tale of the problems we are about to witness and endure. The first chart, the ETF UUP, indicates that if we don’t get a short to intermediate term recovery, this sucker is heading downtown and big time. The Dubai crisis might just save the dollar thanks to our friends in Europe taking it in the shorts from this crisis but the U.S. will not go unscathed thus why there were lights on at so many banks and trading desks today.

The second chart is that of our 2 year Treasury Yield and folks, we haven’t been here since, well, see for yourself:

Tonight the yield is 0.66%, 1 beep above the disaster of last winter.

Buckle up gang and get ready for Benron and Geithner to pay lip service and proclaim all is well.

That worked out real good for the employees at Lehman, WaMu and the United States Taxpayer last year, didn’t it?

0400 update:

As you can see from the chart at about the time the Arab region markets opened, someone sold a buttload of gold. That is your tell tale sign of someone in desperation attempting to raise cash quickly. While this is a volatile number the 2 Year Treasury yield is now 0.63% a new low since these series of crisis have begun. Stay tuned, this will not be a dull day.

by John Galt

November 25, 2009

“And Zeus gave ample plunder to their hand,

That they embark and get them to their land

With ships full-laden,  even on them great fear

Falls of the Watchers in heaven who stand.”

-The Odyssey by Homer, Book Fourteenth, page 159, translated by J.W. Mackail 1905

Alas a quick note before I present the fourth entry. The proverbial “powers that be” are our collection of Gods in the minds of those married to a digital scroll of symbols and numbers flashing across their screens every day and to those unwilling to grasp the gravity of sacrificing freedom for financial security, liberty for laziness, and willing to adore false idols for the perception that these ‘men’ not deities will protect and enhance their freedoms. In this episode I shall attempt to bring thousands of years of human fascination with power into the grasp of how our willingness to sacrifice choice for security results in a situation not too much out of the reach with the actions of the elites within our financial, academic and political classes.

May you have a blessed Thanksgiving and understand that our time has been marked, our actions noted, the duty soon to be paid.

The presentation below in ITALICS is fiction……

February 23, 2010 6:30 P.M. ET

Georgia on my Mind

Tom stirred awake when the alarm on his wristwatch stirred him into a startled look around the room. “Sigh, thank God, I’m home” he said out loud then calling out to his wife “Honey, let’s talk sweetheart and I’m sorry I’ve upset you so much.”  Sandy walked out of the bedroom smoking a cigarette, something she had not done since they both quit ten years ago and yelled at Tom in a drunken stupor “Okay you geek, what the hell do you want to talk about now? The end of the world? Obama having alien ears and a forked tail protruding from his butt?  The local newsboy spying on us when he delivers the paper? I swear you’re a (burp) loser Tom, why the bleep am I married to you?”

Tom was stunned by this outburst then noticed she was taking another swig from a cheap bottle of wine they used to keep on the shelf for ‘those’ guests that they did not want to serve the good stuff to.  “SANDY!” he exclaimed, “What in the heck is wrong with you? Why don’t you sit down and watch the national news with me tonight, let’s get close and see what is going on so we can decide what to do.” Sandy looked at him, her eyes totally glazed over mumbling “What to do? What to do? What to do? Hell boy, you ain’t got a clue as to what to take for lunch day to day and you are worried about some slicked up steaming pile on the TeeVee says about a situation that is so fake it isn’t even funny? You want me to follow you, Mr. Wimpy Boy? The Man with a plan from the internet because you read three articles on the 2012 movie? Just stay out of my way while I find another bottle, I’m going to drink until I pass out and you can eat your damned Spaghetti Freaking O’s by yourself mister.”

Tom sighed loudly and looked at her with those big puppy dog eyes and started to plead, “Baby, if I’m wrong about this, I’ll leave you alone. But if this situation is as bad as I saw at WalMart this morning, we should get ready for some bad times. Please, sit down beside me for just a half hour, we’ll watch whichever news show appeals to you.”  Sandy put the empty bottle on the floor of the hallway, stumbled over to Tom’s lap and grabbed the remote control, switching around until she found Katie Couric on CBS news which was just starting. Sandy blurted out “This wench has it going on you know. She threw Tom Cruise off her sofa!” Tom sighed again, hugged her waist and watched with great interest as the news began.

CBS news sounded hauntingly like the FEMA updates, plain, bland and with repeats of information until about fifteen minutes into the show when Tom and his intoxicated wife noticed there were no commercials for Viagra, bladder issues or tingly leg syndrome. Sandy said “Okay know it all, what is this scroll at the bottom and top of the screen?” Tom looked and the top scroll was in Spanish much to his surprise and the bottom one in English stating that the broadcast was “cleared” by the Department of Homeland Security and the Bureau of Economic Oversight. “Honey, I have no idea, this is weird” he replied to her. Katie then read a story about the hardships of the inner city during this economic recession and how the government under Obama’s leadership was ending discrimination against the poor and other economic minorities. “SSDD I guess eh baby?” Sandy said in her stupor. Tom just nodded and started to worry as this was weird that all commercial television, no matter the channel he switched to, did not have any commercials. Perhaps things will be better in the morning, if he could just get Sandy to pass out he thought to himself.

Fergus Falls Down

February 23, 2010 5 P.M. CT

Mike’s shirt was soaked after several hours of chopping wood, fixing gaps in his barbed wire fence,  checking locks and securing his semi. As he popped the cover off his face to drink some hot tea from his Thermos, a sound he was shocked to hear appeared in the bitter winter silence, that of his cell phone ringing as if never had owned one before. Hesitating slightly he opened the phone to check the number and sure enough it was his dispatcher finally calling him back. “Mike, are you home, I hope?” the voice on the other end sputtered out.  “Larry, I’m good. The load is secured. And if you’re asking me if I am delivering tomorrow, you’ll have to guarantee that I can turn around and come home” Mike replied. Larry hesitated and spoke slowly, as if not to upset his driver, “Mike, I was planning on reloading you at Hormel with an emergency shipment for Dallas in the evening. I really need this one.” Mike was stunned. He took a deep breath and told his dispatcher of three years in a very slow speaking Midwest intonation “Larry, I’ve known you for several years now. I can not use my credit cards, my fuel card and I don’t have the cash for the trip. You’re asking me to leave my wife for a week or more by herself in a small town now surrounded by deputies guarding against God knows what AND you and the company have no damned idea on how or when you’ll pay me. If you were in my shoes, just what the heck do you think the response would be? I’ve got about a third of a load of frozen pork and no guarantees I’ll get paid, protected or anything so if you think I am going to Duluth tomorrow without being paid, you are nuttier than that FEMA broad on the radio every hour!”

Larry was somewhat shocked at this tone of voice and even more so when Mike hung up. But the reason the phone was disconnected would not be known to Mike or Larry for weeks to come.  A driver in a tanker truck was run off the road by a group of thugs and took out the cell phone tower about three miles north of Mike’s house. Little did anyone know that Fergus Falls Minnesota and many other small towns would soon fall prey to the scum of the earth as the weakest links would be picked off first.

For the first time in Mike’s life since Vietnam, he took the night shift for guard duty. He prayed hard for his son in Afghanistan and wished he was home. Mike knew their lives were changing but the consequences of years of living off of the fat of the land had distorted this small town’s perception of the big world that Mike knew all so well from his trips around the country.  “Fergus will fall as America is falling” he thought to himself.

As darkness enveloped his town and the bitter cold set in, he longed for the days of old when neighbor could trust neighbor.  That was the first victim of this week’s events and as the shortages began, the victims would multiply.

February 23, 2010 7:10 P.M. ET

Even my wife was impressed with dinner tonight. We had agreed after a long talk to relax, take in the information and just relax. I had cooked two of the steaks in our freezer that I had started marinating in Italian dressing the night before and the smell on the grill just had to make the neighbors envious as there were so many snowbirds down here already escaping the bitter cold of up north and not used to the smell of char grilled ribeyes in February unless they were regulars down here. We cracked open a bottle of wine we had been saving since our wedding day for a special occasion and we figured that with steaks, baked potatoes on the grill, vegetable kabobs and some fantastic garlic toast from our local bakery that the end of our nation as we knew it fit as a special occasion. After all that and the last drop of wine was consumed, we needed to walk it off and despite a brisk sixty-one degree evening, we decided to head over to the Ringling Bridge.

February 23,  2010 8:00 P.M. ET

The new Ringling Bridge opened years ago lacked the character of the old draw bridge but for our little community, it was a fantastic and brisk walk up and down with the ‘largest hill’ in our area plus the traffic actually stopped backing up into downtown Sarasota once it opened. As my wife and I parked the care over by Marina Jack’s we walked down noticing the flashing lights of police cars at the base of the bridge and wondered if there was a bad accident or what could have happened now.

As my beautiful wife and I approached the southern sidewalk to the bridge a local officer approached my wife and I with his flashlight pointed in our faces and what appeared to be his other hand on his pistol. “What can I do for you two?” the officer asked. I replied we were just going for our nightly walk on the bridge like we have for years now and wanted some fresh air. “Do you have some identification on you, both of you please?” he asked somewhat insistently. I handed my license over to him and explained my wife doesn’t carry her purse on her when she walks as he basically ignored my words and walked over to the squad car, now with another officer watching us closely.

“Sir, I notice on your records you have a firearm in your ownership and a CCW, are you carrying now?” he asked with the pistol now drawn but pointing down to his side. “No sir,”  I replied, “I do not carry when I walk around here, I’ve never had to.” The officer seemed satisfied with my reply and then pointed us back towards the parking lot and stated firmly as he holstered his weapon “All of the barrier islands in Florida are now closed I am afraid. We are under strict orders to restrict access out here because of fears of retaliation.”

“Retaliation?” I thought to myself and apparently so did my wife as she looked at me somewhat worried. “No problem officer, we’ll just head back home” I said to the officer as I slowly turned my back and walked with my wife back to the car. Once we were pulling out of the parking lot and heading home we noticed the marina had private security guards setting up for the night, another new feature and that prompted her to ask “Retaliation against who or what?” I told her I did not know and we headed home as I just had to get on the message boards and find out what the heck was going on.

February 23, 2010 9:40 P.M. ET

The wife, normally whining about my time talking to my friends on the phone and online said she was doing the same to try to figure out what was happening. Her first inquiries yielded a response from her friend online from Australia of “sucks to be you” or worse words to that effect. The interesting responses I saw on the message boards I frequented ranged from the bizarre to the sheeple and really failed to shed any light except that some other members noticed an upgrade in the law enforcement protection around the affluent neighborhoods in their towns.

As the banter and speculation went back and forth via email and messages alike, I tuned into CNBC and Bloomberg to see what the various opinions of our financial markets just might be for the future. CNBC-Asia actually looked relatively normal except for the scrolls at the bottom with the “ALL FINANCIAL MARKETS CLOSED UNTIL FEBRUARY 25, 2010″ over and over again with some program announcements. Bernie Lo had Jim Rogers on tonight at 10 p.m. Eastern and I could not miss this interview as I figured it was the “see I told you so moment” of all time as Singapore looked like the new financial center of the world as New York just imploded. CNBC in the United States was a different story entirely. It appeared that Cramer was sweating more than Coach Andy Reid of the Philadelphia Eagles trying to choose toppings at a sub shop and Kudlow looked as if his dog had just been hit by a dump truck. They were both trying to justify a cause for hope by parsing a speech from President Obama and speculating on just what Ben Bernanke would be saying tomorrow. In the mean time Rick Santelli upset both of them by stating that the U.S. Dollar was the equivalent of burnt toast at the now bankrupt Waffle House in the Southeastern states. Rick was in rare form tonight as he then launched into an attack of the ‘God Complex’ the central banks seemed to exhibit thinking they could manage capitalism and investors instead of letting the market do it’s job. When Cramer tried to defend the G20 meeting, Santelli cut him off and said the following which stuck in my mind from that day on:

“These arrogant fools have been acting like Gods for years now and guess what James? They have destroyed the American model for capitalism. You’ve made your money. I’ve made mine. But for the average slob on the street, they are now slaves to the dictates of these megalomaniacs who think that they are above every aspect of human society and our Constitution. You and your kind make me sick. It really doesn’t matter what you say now Jim, the markets are dead and you helped kill them.”

“Honey, are we out of port?” I yelled as she walked to the kitchen.

February 23, 2010 10:59 A.M. Hong Kong Time

Interview with a Vampire

Bernie Lo: “Jim it is good to have you back and I’m sure that with only the Chinese internal markets open, you have quite a bit you would like to discuss tonight.”

Jim Rogers: “Good morning Bernie. To say this was not going to be easy to see as a possibility of happening would be a lie.”

Bernie: “I must ask, do you think we will see the North American and European markets open again before March or April?”

Jim: “Absolutely no later than March. If they fail to open their equity markets by the middle of March you might as well just hold a massive liquidation sale. The United States has to absorb the pain they have postponed and insure that functioning capital markets are returned to operation soon or the rest of the world will just circumvent their currencies, debt and banking systems. It would be tantamount to the sinking the Titanic and selling more tickets to board it unless they open the markets up and allow capitalism to repair itself.”

Bernie: “So what happens to other equity markets as they re-open to international investment? Will they not have to impose limits or….?” (Interrupted)

Jim: “Centralized economies and banks will impose capital flow restrictions. I imagine the Asian governments will restrict the amount of withdrawals to insure their banking systems do not collapse but the silence has been deafening. I imagine everyone is going to follow the American lead but we have to wait for Bernanke and his merry band of idiots to speak tonight.”

Bernie: “I have to ask, what becomes of the dollar, a subject we have discussed many times and the price of gold?”

Jim: “That really depends on what you are pricing gold in. Gold in United States dollars will be unattainable at any price now inside of North America barring currency controls by Canada and Mexico and neither of those nations can afford the risk of alienating the Federal Reserve, especially Mexico. The price of gold in Euros should top out around one thousand to two thousand Euros only because of the exposure of ECB to dollar based debt and investments by the continent. The United Kingdom might as well join the European Union now because the Sterling is useless except for wadding. The Asian currencies, ags and precious metals are the place to be and if you really push me, the price of gold in U.S. dollars will open back up well over two thousand dollars per ounce if the markets are allowed to trade. The dollar itself though is no longer a functional measure of trade nor investment and can now be openly dismissed as a reserve currency.”

Bernie: “Then what exactly will function as the new reserve currency for world trade? I mean, uh, Jim, what you are saying is a total shock to the system and will change the nature of foreign investment activity for years to come.”

Jim: “We’ll know when Bernanke speaks. But if I am the ruler or President of a nation, the reserve currency of choice is the primary asset or commodity I have on hand. Many nations started to hoard precious metals, oil and base metals the past four years. I think they set the tone no matter the decisions of the G20 yesterday. As I told you a few years ago, farmland is investment number one if you live in the U.S. now and for the rest of the world the decoupling that many said would not happen will have to happen.”

Bernie: “With that, I must say good night Jim and thank you for another enlightening discussion.”

I did not notice it until my wife screamed at me. There was  a glass tipped over with port wine soaking into our carpet. She must have been yelling at me for ten minutes.

“I’m sorry honey, I’m in a little bit of shock. Remember all those bad things I said that could happen? Well, they have. Let me find out what the plans are for the local governments online and statewide. We may have to hit the road on very short notice.”

February 24, 2010 12:21 A.M. ET

I’ll never forget the email I received in answer to my question about the bridge incident. It was from an old retired friend from the local police force and he said it best:

John,

Are you an idiot or something? What are you still doing in town? The reason they closed the barrier islands was to prevent attacks against the homes of the bankers and investment community who created this crap hole of a disaster! They are going to do all they can to protect those clowns even if it means half the damned town burns down. Do you honestly think they will let riff-raff like you get out there on the Key with the likes of Springer and King? Not to mention all the scammers who screwed us over out of our retirements and future?

Damn. It made perfect sense now. The police were following orders and I was willing to bet that other areas like that were well guarded. Which meant my home, my cars and my “stuff” was pretty much on my own. With that in mind, I muted the television, tucked my .45 into its holster and went outside to our driveway to move my pick up right up to the bumper of my wife’s car in the carport and to scout the yard. As I searched with a flashlight, I drew my pistol at the first noise, only to see a raccoon scurry into our neighbors back yard. With the deep exhale, I started to head inside when in the distance several loud cracks rang out. It sounded like firecrackers but there was no way anyone beside those who held gold or Swiss francs would be celebrating.

I ran back inside, locked all the doors, put chairs from the dining rooms under the doorknobs and in front of the glass doors then checked all the windows. With that I went back to the computer to see what the Chinese markets were doing. I slid the holster off my side, put it up on my desk in my office and logged into my Bloomberg terminal, hoping for a news and market update. The scroll at the bottom of the screen told me that I would not get much sleep tonight:

BERNANKE AND FED TO ANNOUNCE BANK RE-OPENING PROCESS…….OBAMA TO SPEAK TO NATION AT 8 P.M. EASTERN……GENERAL ELECTRIC TO FILE FOR CHAPTER 11 BANKRUPTCY AT 8 A.M. EASTERN WITH FED PERMISSION FOR REORGANIZATION…..FEDERAL HOME LOAN BANKS TO BE NATIONALIZED…..CHINESE YUAN REVALUED AT 2:1 RATIO TO US DOLLAR FOR 30 DAYS….

Coffee or port were the only questions I had left now. The die has been cast…..

Arrogance of the Gods (The Day the Dollar Died Part IV) by John Galt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at johngaltfla.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.johngaltfla.com.

By John Galt

November 23, 2009

Because I have received so many emails and you have been kind enough to ask, I shall publish Part IV of ‘The Day the Dollar Died’ series titled “Arrogance of the Gods” on Wednesday November 25, 2009. I hope you enjoy your Thanksgiving and elect not to send me any more hate mail because guess what? I can not stop what the Federal Reserve nor can you unless we elect a whole boatload of real leaders who care about our nation and fast.

Thanks again for all the kind words gang!

John

by John Galt

November 23, 2009

The headline from Bloomberg tonight says it all:

Consumer Spending, Home Sales Probably Rose as U.S. Recovery Takes Root

then we get a boatload of “experts” commenting on the move of the 1-3-6 Treasuries that I follow like a bad religion:

Sinking Short term Treasury yields aren’t a sign of panic this time

Huh? As if that story from the Los Angeles Times was not bad enough, I happened to listen to Bloomberg Radio Friday morning and Michael Pond, the interest rate strategist from Barclay’s, actually told the hosts with a straight face that the reason the 3 month yield had turned negative and the 1 month below 0.01% (at that moment) was due to “year end” events where major banks and houses who had made a fortune to invest in equities and riskier bonds over 2009 and make a profit were actually taking profits and parking money in safety.

Granted my fellow readers, old and new, that I was not and never have been an attendee at Yale, Harvard, Brown, Cornell nor did I take the West Pawtuckett School for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind’s correspondence courses on economics. But if Michael Pond is going to convince me that tens if more likely hundreds of billions of dollars in profits were locked in by the most intelligent investing houses on the planet and they are now willing to accept a loss on those investments for the next 6 months because the world is just full of flying purple unicorns pooping Skittles and McDonald’s Happy Meals, then I guess the hosts at Bloomberg and the rest of the world truly has been taken over by zombies with zero capacity to do some basic math.

With monthly CPI the “official” inflation rate at 0.3% this means that those “brilliant” investors were according to the L.A. Times article expert they quoted:

“It may look like another fear-driven panic, but this time is different: In large part the latest decline in shorter-term yields just stems from moves by banks and other financial firms to bolster their balance sheets with highly liquid assets as 2009 ends, says Tom di Galoma, head of U.S. rates trading at Guggenheim Capital Markets in New York.

“They’re dressing up the books for year-end,” he said. The more liquid you can look to your regulators, the better.”

So he said the same thing the Barclay’s clown said  but never discussed one minor factor and that was inflation and negative yields. These propagandists, like so many others I heard and read about on Friday said almost the exact same thing:

Year end window dressing.

NEVER in all my years of following the bread and circus show since the 1987 crash  have I ever seen any investor saying “well, I made money this year so for the next three to six months, I guess I’ll park my billions in a loser and accept some minor losses to make my boss happy and keep the government from wondering what was up with that.” Ed Hart must be spinning in his grave due to the volume of bovine scatology being spewed.

Basic math boys and girls:

If you buy a 6 month bond yielding a +0.09% but CPI is on average 0.3% you’re losing 0.21% every month until maturity assuming CPI is a constant. If you buy a 3 month, you’re losing 0.32% and a 1 month 0.3005%. Thus the reason the bond yields are so low, as low as they were when Lehman blew up, WaMu went Tango Uniform, and when the viability of Citigroup was called into question (never mind, that’s every week; bad example) the clowns are telling us that multi-billionaires are locking in the profits they made by losing money over a short to intermediate time span.

Yo, unicorn, I want the Chicken McNugget Happy Meal and toss in the Hamburglar Corvette as my toy.

The yield curve is calling them a liar and telling the truth (from FINRA’s website):

Since I don’t have my K-Mart now Sears Blue Light Special Degree in Economics handy, let’s move on to some other troubling aspects of the economic data for the week which when married with the bond markets should cause great concern for anyone following the disaster which is upon us again, er, continuing.

Housing 101

A wise man named Phil Grande of Phil’s Gang fame once said:

Housing Permits are an indication of economic strength 6 months out.

Or words to that effect.

Need proof? Here’s a picture worth 2 million plus jobs and then some in the months to come:

On the bad news side, we are below the 1959 to 1974 levels.

On the good news side, we are above the worst of the 1975-76 recession levels.

Wheee! Party time!

If you care for a dash of confirmation, here are the starts which trail and give you some idea of just how bad it is as we are at the lowest levels in history:

This means no one is really buying homes in large numbers, builders are laying more people off, construction companies are not hiring, appliance companies are cutting production back further, etc., etc., etc.

The recovery is what I said it would be on January 2, 2009: “The Obama Economic Miracle” and in reality it is a buttload of government pork shoveled out to political favorites in the corporate world to put a floor under the decline. I look for numerous revisions to Q3 GDP if these clowns are honest as every data point quoted as a “strong” indicator of a recovery in October and early November has been revised DOWN.Without housing and autos the American recovery does not recover and this opens the door for the Fed’s Zimbabwe strategy where they try to emulate Argentina all the while shrinking heads in the kitchens of Federal Reserve banks nationwide.

The Gold Warning

The three year chart for gold says it all:

It seemed like just yesterday where Dylan Ratigan went from a show with 500 viewers to a network with 431 viewers but from the time he was there until the current show with the hot chick hosting, all we’ve heard is “oh gold sucks, it’s a horrid investment and a barbaric relic that just sits there.”

Yup, it just sits there appreciating 9 years straight while the famous triple top (no way it’s going past $1000 now, right?) was called and inflation declared dead forever in this great deflation which will turn America into a Sushi eating duplication of Japan except we’re too tall for many of the rides they have at Disney in Tokyo.  The reality is that deflation is not here, but inflation is just lagging under the guise of disinflation as if we were experiencing a true dollar based deflation, non-precious commodity metals like, oh, say, Doctor Copper would be tanking. Right?

If copper starts to follow instead of lead gold as it was doing, then all bets are off as to the new high price for gold in the 6 months to follow. If gold continues to advance in price and copper makes a new high at the same time, this support will cause the entire commodity complex to take another moon shot. The Gold ETF (GLD) is confirming the move nicely also but in my opinion there is a massive distrust of any paper based representation for any physical metal, thus the reason the third world and emerging market central banks are taking delivery as opposed to trusting the ‘word’ or promises of the Western banking cabal.

Thus we should pull back at some point to at least kiss the 50 day moving average but a retest to the lows of this year is highly unlikely and the deflation crowd and shorts could get smoked at year end if they wish to be the bagholders for the stupidity of our Federal Reserve and politicians. I think the floor I projected in the $1014 to $1025 range holds and with that bottom, barring the reality of my speculative fiction series coming true, we shall se a pullback towards that support area only to be reversed to new highs in one final parabolic move above the $1800 level sometime next year. I realize I thought this might happen this year, but the geopolitical, fiscal and economic circumstances were skillfully forestalled by the political class for long enough to survive the election and new President’s first year. Going into next year’s election however, instability will be the problem for all elected officials from the dog catcher to the Senator as Americans are getting somewhat sick and tired of having their retirement accounts, currency and freedoms devalued without their approval.

Until tomorrow night…..

John

By John Galt

November 22, 2009

As some of you know, I’ve been at this since 2007 and during the summer I was hacked, jacked and hijacked. Thankfully the new versions of WordPress and the software I’ve added to my system are a little bit stronger but the results were a loss of everything on my blog during that two year period. I’ve been reconstructing from an email backup that I would receive and trying to add the necessary  information but to save time, money and storage space I’ve loaded the raw html pages up to the website. I’ll be doing this 5-10 pages at a time, more so over the holidays and should have most of it restored in short order. The very first thread and major posting on this blog “Weimarica” will be up next in the rebuilding process.

Thanks for your patience and I tried salvaging the comment sections where I could. I’ve lost all of my own graphs (rats) but some pics are still there.

John

Yes, I finally did it.  My better half said that as I post more and more I should join Twitter and yes, johngaltfla is now active at Twitter.com.

As I learn, blunder and screw it up bear with me as I prefer to learn by doing, no matter how bad it looks when I screw up.

by John Galt

November 21, 2009

The following story in ITALICS is what some like to call speculative fiction, what I like to call a potential scenario for the culmination of thirty-six plus years of blunders by an incompetent group of bankers hell bent on completing their one hundred year plan of world financial domination. Of course their inability to grasp or destroy the concept of nationalism and individual identity will prove to be their ultimate undoing, but you can not tell them anything, so we all get to suffer while they learn.

“Citizens of the United States, citizens of the world,  I wish to bring you a message tonight of hope and dreams and most of all assurance. Decades ago one of my heroes uttered those famous words of ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’ and to that theme,  I too, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt call now on the citizens not just of the United States but of the world to begin a move to restoration, beyond the call to change our  ethics and to begin to undertake an immediate and drastic course of action to preserve and enhance the future  for billions of people.

We have assembled in Geneva to initiate a practical and realistic course of action to correct the errors of previous administrations, of prior nationalist xenophobic ideals, and to end the cursed reality of a system of capitalism which has failed because the participants within the economy refused to shoulder the responsibilities inherent with the great power and wealth the people granted them. The expansion of our ideals was fruitful, beneficial and helpful to establishing a global expansion far greater than any in the history of mankind, yet my powers and those of our central banking system were immediately tested one year ago as this very expansion collapsed as the illusion of wealth isolated within the purview of the few deprived the necessary capital to continue economic growth. This shall no longer stand. The governments of the world can no longer stand idly by and allow the minority the great responsibility of the engine of growth to become restricted opportunities for their own benefit at the expense of the citizens of the free world. Tough decisions have been made in these meetings; decisions which will impact every man, woman and child for a generation forward and impose great stresses on those unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices to preserve our nation, our freedom, and our participation as the leading light of freedom in the governance of our planet.

There are those in my nation which will demand immediate redress and accuse my administration and the Federal Reserve of abandoning our principles, our ideals and our Constitution.  The future for the United States demands that the decisions here to be implemented immediately and when I depart Switzerland today, the process of legal acceptance of the World Currency Treaty of Geneva will be immediately implemented via Executive Order and those aspects requiring the U.S. Senate’s approval sent immediately to Majority Leader Harry Reid.  Failure to pass and execute every aspect of this treaty is not an option. The divisions our decisions will create will not receive an immediate embrace by the American business community but that is a price we must pay for the errors of our way.  In my capacity as leader of the United States and free peoples of the world,  I shall do what I must to preserve the Republic and to insure we survive as a nation united.

For I have been to the fields of Gettysburg and seen what division, distrust and dissolution can do to a nation, and I wish to be remembered as a modern day  Lincoln, doing what must be done in the name of God, Country and the World to preserve our nation and insure that the intentional community is not shattered by our malfeasance.  The American people and our economic might will make good on all of the debts owed to the world. The American people  and our economic will shall control spending and abide by the demands of the international community. The American people and our corporate citizens will absorb the necessary oversight by all world bodies agreed to in this meeting and that of the November 2007 G20 Cape Town Accords and the November 2008 G20 Washington Financial Systems Accords.  Charmain Bernanke will issue a paper on Wednesday, February 24th at precisely 6 p.m. Eastern Time to outline the changes to the domestic financial system and prepare for the re-opening of our financial markets at a later date.

In the interim, we will proceed with actions to preserve the health, safety and national welfare of our citizens while initiating the undertaking of these agreements. To quote another hero of mine, Martin Luther King Junior:

‘And another reason that I’m happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn’t force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them.’

Under the leadership of our Legislative branches, our people and my administration, this time and once and for all I assure the people of the United States and the free world that we shall overcome.

Good night and God Bless America and the World.”

February 23, 2010 12:21 P.M. ET

As the bartender at the country club turned the television off then smashed the remote against the wall, his next words were not the revolutionary explosion in patriotism nor compliance President Obama probably would have expected:

“Free Drinks until we run dry!”

Alas, it was not Patrick Henry nor Ben Franklin but considering that everyone in the room, including some of Obama’s supporters, all felt like we were just sold out, it was only a matter of time until anarchy began to reign supreme. The club my boss was a member of was quite exclusive but not isolated from the reality of our community. The sirens were blaring constantly in the area towards I-75 and the helicopter that serviced Sarasota Memorial Hospital seemed extraordinarily busy the entire time we were playing but this brief vacation from reality ended with President Obama’s words.

“John”, my boss spoke softly, “here’s a toast to you and your family. May you survive this nightmare and thrive on the chaos which follows.” He raised his glass, drank a shot of bourbon, poured another one from the bottle the bartender dropped off at our table then handed me two one hundred dollar bills and left with the bottle in his hands. “Uh, I don’t think you should try to drive sir, I mean I appreciate all of this but…” and before I could finish he cut me off and yelled back into the silent room “Who cares? What are they going to do, FINE ME WITH THE DEAD MONEY? The hell with everyone and this government.”

He walked out the door and barked the tires on his Cadillac Escalade out of the parking lot and away forever.

I went back inside, gave the barkeep one of the Benjamins, thanked him and he handed me a bottle of wine saying “Your wife might need this.” I nodded, headed to my car and proceeded to look for a gas station that was open. I figured I had best top things off while I still had some cash on hand because who would know what was the consequence of today’s speech outside of D.C.

February 23, 2010 1:13 P.M. ET

The Sunoco station on U.S. 41 had all of the pumps covered with bags but the store, amazingly enough was open. I elected to go on inside, buy a six pack of misery juice and converse with the young man who I had come to know since he bought the station five years after emigrating from Pakistan. Tran, as he liked to be called was somewhat nervous but also enjoying a banner day of sales being one of the few stores to be open and gambling by making manual credit card slips and accepting cash of course.  I noticed the empt shelves everywhere and asked him just how he made it. “Easy,” he said, “I held inventory off site a month ago waiting for a hurricane or a day like this.” I had to laugh but then it hit me to ask him, “Does that include gasoline?”

Tran nodded and said something fascinating, “John, for you I do this.  It will cost you $5 per gallon which is the new minimum legal price but I can sell it to you. You have to accept this paper and keep it in your truck until you get home.” He scribbled my name on one line and checked a box titled “Civilian Emergency Services” and then shoved it over to me asking me to sign it. The FEMA moniker at the top of the page looked almost false but the date and title froze me in my tracks:

FEDERAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

EFFECTIVE FOR 14 DAYS FROM DATE OF ISSUE

PERMIT FOR EMERGENCY PURCHASE OF GASOLINE, DIESEL OR OTHER FUEL PRODUCTS FOR APPROVED DOMESTIC AVIATION, AGRICULTURAL, COMMERCIAL OR EMERGENCY CIVILIAN USAGE

Maximum Purchase Limit: 20 Gallons

CERTIFICATE NUMBER: 5FL399303134231

STATION ID: 1137756-34231

Without hesitation nor caring about the repercussions, I signed it with an illegible signature, handed him the other one hundred dollar bill that my now apparently former boss handed me and went to the pump he directed me to so I could get that 20 gallons in my pick up and go home. As I put the handle back on the pump and covered it back up with the bag as instructed, an ill feeling started to sink in to me; this document was issued on a Sunday and since when could they get this out to so many stations so fast unless this plan was already in place!

February 23, 2010 2:30 P.M. ET

I walked in the door of my home, dropped my golf clubs, found my wife and gave her a long tight hug with a tear in my eye. She asked me “What’s wrong honey?” and the story of this day was told. But this day was far from over.

Fort Fergus Falls

“Break 9, break 9, is there anyone out there. This is John Donaldson of Whittaker Trucking out of  Des Moines, IA and my rig is being shot at by unknown attackers at mile marker 56 on I-94 southbound. Anyone in Fergus Falls out there? Help please, help, I am being attacked. For God Sakes is anyone out there?”

The citizens band radio rang out again with a call for help. Mike had only been home for what seemed like a few hours and his base station was ringing with calls for help. He bypassed calling 911 and called his old pal Deputy Monckton directly on his personal cell phone. “Jack, do you have your CB on?” Mike asked before the deputy could even say hello. The deputy politely replied that he did not and Mike got somewhat excited and told him what he had heard. “I’m on it” the deputy replied and as the deputy put the phone down he could hear him calling for backup before he hung up.  Mike was exhausted but now was not the time to sleep in his mind. He put his winter gear on, grabbed some chains and locks, wrapped them around the doors on his trailer and then backed the truck up against the wall of his home so the doors could not be opened.

His wife, looking at him like he was insane heard Mike snap like the old Sarge he used to be in Vietnam “Sal, you start finding anything that can hold water and start filling it up. Use totes, buckets, I don’t care and I don’t care if we put it in the garage and it freezes up. We’re going to need it!” Mike then grabbed a pistol, loaded it, put it in his pocket and went out into his barn to start chopping wood.

He didn’t stop until six o’clock that night, tears streaming down this tough vet’s face as he finished tying off each bundle.

Take Your Pork and Beans and Stick it Mister

Tom sat in front of his television after the Obama speech from Geneva in stunned silence. Sandy looked at him and said “See, I told you they had a plan and we would be fine. Here you are buying all kinds of fatty crappy foods we’ll never need to eat and end up donating to some food bank and the President has it all under control. You’re an idiot honey and if you think I’m going to sit around drinking bottled water and pork n’ beans all night you can stick it mister!”

Tom was not exactly what many would call a “Type A” personality but he had hit his limit with the lack of sleep.  “Woman,” Tom yelled, “I was just trying to take care of this family and protect you from the unknown. If you think this is over, then why in the Sam Hell is your beloved QVC and Oprah still off the air?” Sandy had heard enough, uttered some very terse curse words and went to the bedroom slamming the door and locking it while screaming all of the way. Tom slinked back to his chair after putting the cans up in the pantry in a somewhat organized manner and returned to the television to see what was new. By now it was 3 p.m. Eastern Time and that meant the start of the new hourly news and information reports from FEMA and the Voice of America Domestic Services. “It beats MSNBC” he thought to himself, as he drifted off to sleep to the melodic sounds of Yankee Doodle in  the background.

“I Have Been to the Fields of Gettysburg” (The Day the Dollar Died Part III) by John Galt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at johngaltfla.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.johngaltfla.com.

by John Galt

November 19, 2009

The following posting in ITALICS to represent the fictional perspective I see possible during a week long currency crisis created by the United States government and how it might well be viewed from the eyes of a blogger, a truck driver and a warehouse section manager. The premise might seem like a crisis that could not happen here, but does it really take much of a reach to come to these conclusions? Each individual might react differently, each aspect of the story questionable to some degree but the question has been asked of yours truly as to why and how the series of events could occur in such rapidity and without warning. For those that have been reading my pages and works since late 2005 when some friends in the real estate and financial industry made me aware and gave me the red pill so I could understand the depths of the financial fraud being perpetuated on our nation and much of the Western world married to our foolishness.

To provide an alternative to just the story telling aspects as how I envision such a time line let me start with another opening salvo and commentary on today’s markets to give you a perspective. The regular readers of these pages understand that I have been preaching the 1-3-6 Rule for some time and as such a quick rehash for my new guests is in order. During the peak of the financial and credit crisis in 2008 and 2009, the 1, 3 and 6 month United State Treasuries had their yields crater to 0.00% or into negative territory in some cases and just above that during other periods.  Let us start this brief trip in time with a story from Reuters on April 20, 2009 titled:

US Treasury bill rates fall on bank concerns

Today those rates per CNBC are:

1 Month: 0.01%

3 Month: 0.01%

6 Month: 0.11%

Those are absurd yields by any stretch but when measured against the last “official” inflation report you are actually paying the government ten cents on the dollar to hold your money.  To get a better perspective, here is the report from Bondsonline at 1626 ET on November 19, 2009:

Thus you do not have to take my word on it. We have billions of dollars pouring into short term Treasury Bills to essentially pay the government to “store” or hold their money for the next 30 days to 91 days and it begs the question as to why. The answers I propose are simple and have been stated many times before, that our financial system is no much more repaired or functional than an airplane is airworthy after it flies into the side of a mountain at 500 knots.  Credit is limited if not totally frozen at many levels and the government’s role as banker of last resort is being tested by foreign powers sick and tired of funding America’s house party. And the timing of the sudden move in short term Treasury yields which began in August of this year and has been accelerating ties in nicely with the timing of the fictional death of our dollar I have been outlining.  I shall continue to add to the story and highlight the news stories and related articles in a later thread with the appropriate links to give my readers some idea as to how these theoretical conclusions were reached.

The party is about to end. Let’s take another look to see what the hangover from the party might just look like……..

“Ah, Lincoln Avenue exit, Thank You Lord for getting me home!” an exhausted driver named Mike exhaled as he saw the ramp approach.  Had had just over a half tank of fuel and could keep the rig running during the icy nights in Minnesota but was more aggravated after today’s events that no one in his office would answer the phone or the Qualcomm communications he had sent.  Mike spent seven hours to get fuel in Fargo as the tanks were empty and the last tanker truck the Petro would send did not arrive until three hours ago. As a result, Mike sent a nasty message to his dispatcher about ice, cold and where it needed to be located up his dispatcher’s torso in Atlanta.  Here it was six o’clock in the morning on I-94 and the roads were packed with truckers as usual but the CB radio screeching with chattering rumors about bank failures and economic collapse. “Good thing I have The Highway channel on my Sirius” he thought to himself as he cruised home to some classic Johnny Cash.

As he started down shifting on to the ramp he noticed that at just after 6 a.m. one of his neighbors, Deputy Monckton was at the bottom of the ramp with his lights flashing and flares across the bottom of the ramp. Mike rolled to a stop and cranked the window down and asked “Hi Jack! What the heck has you out here freezing your tail off this early in the morning?” The Deputy unsnapped the cover from his parka over his face, took a sip of coffee and then spit out some chew to reply, “Mike, you are not going to believe this, I’ve been ordered to close this exit. Locals are the only ones allowed in for the next ten days per the Sheriff and Mayor Hilldegest. We’re supposed to turn everyone away here and off  the old Highway 52 and 210 exits. I hope you’re going home, there’s some wild stories circulating out there!” Mike grabbed a huge gulp of coffee and wiped the over flow off his now frozen beard in the negative 21 degree temps to tell the Deputy “I’m going home and locking and loading. I’ve got a about a third of a load of pork from IBP to deliver tomorrow in Duluth, but now, we might just need it here. Call me if you need my help on the patrols, I’m locking this sucker up.” The deputy said “thanks” gave a half-hearted salute and moved his car to let Mike through. Little did Mike know that the little town of Fergus Falls would get very, very busy before the week was over.

Meanwhile, back in Hampton, Georgia….

February 22, 2010 0315 A.M. ET

Tom finally had the joy of handing a clerk $72.00 to pay for 30 bucks worth of toilet paper and a bunch of canned goods. Amazingly when Tom arrived home a half hour later his wife greeted him at the door. “Well, was it worth it getting all that toilet paper?” Sandy asked. As Tom looked uncomfortably at his lovely wife of twenty years, he started to speak when she interrupted and said “uh, I don’t see any of this magic toilet paper? Where is it sparky?” Tom looked down as he set the first load of bags of canned food down and a full two cases of Saltine crackers and started the story, “Well, uh, honey, you see there was this guy in the parking lot and uh, well, you see, he uh, well, gave me $10 a package for toilet paper I paid $5.99 per package for! He’s such an idiot!!!!” Sandy was not impressed. She said in a stern and disgusted voice “And if we run out because the stores are closed, will you let me use all that money you just earned to wipe my butt?”

“Uh” was all Tom said as he looked down and meandered back to the car for another bag full of canned veggies and Ravioli in the middle of the night.

February 23, 2010 1:41 A.M.

Crap, I forgot to turn off the computer. Look at all the emails and nasty messages. Maybe it is just a bad dream or the bourbon but I swear that even at this time of night the “Day After” as the media was calling it seemed like it was prime time as thousands of people were on my favorite message boards, many pleading for help about their investments or what to do to survive. After finishing up my business in the bathroom, I figured I might as well turn on the idiot box and see if the mainstream had figured out just how severe this historical event was or if our morons who helped make this mess had the nerve to utter any statements from Geneva yet.

As I flipped through I wondered if slugs like Cramer and Kudlow would ever show their face on television again.  I had managed to convince the wife that I needed at least three televisions but that didn’t fly so two would have to do along with a split screen on my monitor as I used when I formerly day traded. She was wonderfully tolerant but knew that I had a clue this might be happening so understood and enjoyed a bottle of wine with me as we talked on the patio before retiring for the evening. Unfortunately my office beckoned and when I saw the insanity on my screen my head almost exploded.

There it was, live at eight minutes until 2 a.m. a repeat of a special “Fast Money” segment on Bubblevision proclaiming and pushing the “Best Stocks to Buy” when the market re-opened next week. The best stocks to buy? These morons are acting as if this was just eating some bad undercooked chicken from a local Chinese choke and puke and once you purge it, you can chow down some more, just add more soy sauce! At 2 a.m. the mood returned to my more somber dark outlook as the Bloomberg network began live coverage from Switzerland and their attitude was 180 degrees from the propagandists on other channels.

The interview they had with the Swiss Finance Minister Merz was pretty much to the point. He looked into the camera and sternly proclaimed “We will not sacrifice Europe nor our economy to save America and their illogical banking structure. We will issue a statement tonight after President Obama speaks at 6 o’clock Geneva time.”  I figured that might give me time to squeeze in eighteen holes and enhance my hangover if I could get back to sleep but that would mean convincing my boss to tee off at 7:30 a.m. instead of 9:30.

05:09 A.M. ET

The snooze button felt good but sleep was not an option. I left my wife’s warmth and comfort to sleep on the guest bed and kept the television volume on low just in case the EAS decided to activate because the ChiComs got sick and tired of the excuses from Obama and Bernanke in Geneva. Of course my paranoid self got the best of me and made me get up, shave, shower and listen intently to the local station which broadcasts the Bloomberg Radio Network exclusively in the early morning.  What was unusual about this mornings program, as I smelled the coffee cranking up from my automatic Mr. Coffee (Dunkin Donuts, fresh ground if you’re curious) was the appearance of the morning team of Tom and Ken a full two hours plus before they normally come on the air. Bloomberg “Surveillance” was on at 5 a.m. and that meant either big news was breaking or there was some serious concern on the behalf of the big money crowd. The first interview they had was with a New York City Councilman who worriedly professed that the longer the markets were closed and the more dangerous the projected actions, the worse the city would be hit. I found that interesting because locally, nothing much of anything beyond the international fiasco was really going on. The bank closings and gas stations running out of gas was just taken in stride by the masses and that’s why I was hurriedly shaving and then putting toilet paper on the fresh cut when Tom Keene said that the projected Dow opening if it were to open today was down thirty percent if it were allowed to trade according to some experts.

06:00 A.M. ET

As I finished my shower the sounds of Bloomberg Radio faded as I turned it down to turn up Bloomberg television and hear the big announcement from the new President of the EU Van Rumpoy state the following:

“The United States Dollar in its current form is no longer an acceptable medium for a reserve currency or international trade with members of the European Union. We have expressed our policy on this matter to the other world leaders and President Obama at the morning meeting. The resolution of the matter will be completed soon and the announcement of our final policy decision will be enunciated at 6 o’clock European Central Time.”

Stunned, I reached for the half full glass of now somewhat warm wine and chugged it. While the sheeple as I affectionately nicknamed them might have slept through this announcement, it was Armageddon for our country. Screw it. I’m going to play golf one more time before it hits the fan. This is absurd.

06:25 A.M. ET

The ‘DING’ on my toaster oven went off faithfully with my last ‘Everything’ bagel and the cream cheese tasted extra rich this morning. It was almost if enjoying life without work was better but instead of retirement it was more of a resigned “now what” attitude. As I walked back into my home office with my bagel on my plate, the beautiful wife was awake and asking what my plan was. I reminded her that there was no work today so go back to bed but she insisted on going into her office, I guessed to answer phones that were not going to ring and hoping someone would help her figure out what was next for her state contracts. I told her that I’m playing golf with my boss so I have my excuse for playing hookie from reality. Just as she was going to reply in a rather rude outburst I asked her to be quiet as Prime Minister Brown from the UK began to speak:

“Fellow citizens of the world, America and the United Kingdom have long enjoyed a special relationship. The matters being discussed within the halls of this meeting in Geneva will not benefit the citizens of the crown nor the free world. The United Kingdom has elected to depart this meeting and recognize the United States Dollar as the primary reserve currency for trading purposes and we fully expect and accept that the Americans will make good on all debts past and present that are owed to our nation as we too shall be strong and persevere in the face of this unwarranted attack on our sovereignty.  The crown and eagle shall stand together, alone if we must. We will not abandon the ally which helped us survive World War Two and the Cold War. Thus the meetings here in Geneva,  from the perspective of the United Kingdom and our financial agencies, are now concluded. Effective at midnight tonight, the United Kingdom shall withdraw from our participation in and investments of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Good day and God Save the Queen.”

06:37 A.M. ET

I walked into my bathroom and got quite ill to my stomach.

07:oo A.M. ET

As I tossed my golf bag into the back of my pick up truck the cell phone rang and of course it was my boss. He said that he had lined us up at the country club but only for 9 holes because he wanted to see what President Obama and the rest of the G20 said at noon today. After signing in and the usual pleasantries, we headed out to the practice green to attempt to warm up a bit. Thankfully, it was a nice Florida morning where global warming had cooled the tee off temp to a robust 49 degrees and as I tried to find my stroke  I muttered under my breath an obscenity (or four) about Al Gore’s family tree and dumped a little Irish Whiskey into my coffee to warm it up.

We walked to the first tee from our golf cart and the Marshal said cheerfully “Have a good time gentlemen, it may not matter tomorrow!” With that I figured it was time to fire up a Diamond Crown #7 and enjoy the scent of a Pyramid Maduro as my golf game was not going to be so hot today. My boss said jokingly “I’ll take one on the second hole if you have one, I’ll be out of business soon anyways” and as he chuckled proceeded to hit a nice drive about two hundred and seventy yards down the right side of the fairway. I reached into my bag and handed him my last cigar and told him to enjoy today because tomorrow was going to really suck. He replied, “Yup. As soon as the courts open, I’m filing Chapter Seven.”

That made for a nice shank about seventy yards behind his ball and in the tall grass leaving me a mountain to climb. But the best part was getting away from the Marshal who was acting as a starter today to work off tips (of course we gave him $10) as now we could talk and drink like Kamikazes on their final mission. The truth about our local situation was about to come out.

09:17 A.M. ET

The Par 5 sixth hole was a monster today with the tees set back in the dew laden grass some 547 yards from the pin. The inhalation of my cigar helped but adding a cocktail to the mix did not hurt. My boss, a normally reserved sixty three year old self-made millionaire was chugging drinks like a mad man and telling all. He told me how the local banks were all insolvent criminal enterprises, as if I did not know that already. He told me that fifty percent of the commercial real estate was already delinquent or ready to be foreclosed upon. He even told me that half of the private jets at our Sarasota airport would be repossessed  if any damned fool would buy them for 30 cents on the dollar! As he hit his second shot off the fairway, I took a swig straight up. The hangover I had this morning was nothing compared to what was coming for America.

11:00 A.M. ET

The approach to the 9th hole was one of both a glazed over look of relief and horror as we knew that once were settled down to watch President Obama’s speech at noon, our lives and our nation would change forever.  My boss laughed as I birdied the hole, giving me a scorching score of 49 on the front nine and he finished up to whip me by ten strokes yet again.  Knowing full well that our relationship as employer and employee was practically over, I looked at him half serious and said “You know if you actually gave me a fair schedule for time off, I would hit the ball as well as you do.”  He let out a huge belly laugh and said that he was buying the first round and not to worry, he was giving every employee one month’s salary on Thursday with the cash he had on hand and more when the banks opened to insure everyone survived before he filed for bankruptcy.

“Dear God” I thought to myself. He’s either fleeing the nation or ending it all. The local news was chocked full of reported and rumored suicides around our community as of yet the names were unconfirmed this morning. The blaring of sirens out to Longboat Key and helicopters flying to our local hospital disturbed the normally quiet winter evening, yet it seemed surreal to everyone who lived in our community. The bartender at the country club looked us in the eye and asked “Are you staying for the big one?” My boss, being the the guy with the attitude now of “whatever” replied, “You mean they are showing a repeat of the Bucs game today again?” The bartender laughed and replied, “No, you know, President Obama and the bankers are going to screw all of us retirees in forty-five minutes! We don’t matter any more, so we figure we’re toast.”

My boss, saddened, looked at him and handed him a $100 bill to my astonishment and said “Old man, this may not be worth anything today, tomorrow or ever again, but take it for what it is worth now. A thank you for helping our nation make it this far.”

I started to get a little misty eyed at that point.

11:55 A.M. ET

CNBC interrupted with news that a WalMart Super Center was in the midst of a riot as it was closed due to running out of stock on the north side of Lexington, KY. As footage rolled in, the scroll said “6 dead, 15 injured” and just as the reporter was getting ready to speak….

11:59 A.M. ET

Attention all broadcast, cable and satellite outlets, this special emergency broadcast from Geneva, Switzerland and the President of the United States begins in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5………..

American Hangover (The Day the Dollar Died, Part II) by John Galt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at johngaltfla.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.johngaltfla.com.

by John Galt

November 18, 2009

The following story in italics is a potential fictional time line for the day the dollar died. I hope not to instill fear or loathing but to give everyone some perspective on a POSSIBLE outcome which does not really take much of a reach to come to any conclusion. Despite popular belief and promises from those who wish to rob you of your savings and investments, the collapse of the dollar might just be an event measured in hours, not days as their control is not what it seems…..

Mike was less than an hour from home in Minnesota after dropping his load off in Fargo but knew he needed to top his tank off this Sunday evening to insure his rig would make it home. He pulled into the Petro Truck Stop just outside of Fargo and hopped out of the cab into the bitter twenty below temperatures which he could not believe had already hit at ten o’clock at night. He slid his fuel card into the pump waiting for the next prompt when the “SEE ATTENDANT” message flashed in the screen. He blustered, figured it was another card problem and whipped out his Master Card and slid it in after the pump reset and again the “SEE ATTENDANT” message flashed up. “What the hell is going on?” he thought to himself as he wandered into the long line of drivers boisterously yelling at managers and clerks alike.

Tom finished up his shift on the docks at the Nestle warehouse in Hampton, Georgia at exactly 11 o’clock at night and decided that because of the scuttlebutt he had been reading on the message boards, it may not be a bad idea to pick up a few cans of food and some toilet paper at the local WalMart Super center. Even though it was a Sunday night, they were always stocked and it was just five minutes out of the way to his home. As he walked inside the store, his mouth dropped. It looked like the day after Thanksgiving sale with every register open and ten plus people deep at 11:30 p.m. “Oh my God!” he gasped as he walked in grabbing the last shopping cart with the wheel that was half locked up.  As he walked as fast as he could to the aisle with the paper goods, he looked at all the shelves then noticed the clerk who looked stunned himself. “How in the SAM HELL does WalMart sell out of Toilet Paper son?” he screamed at the eighteen year old kid. “Sir, I don’t know what is going on. Is the world ending? I’m a little freaked out!” the clerk stammered. Tom realized that he was not to blame and as he calmed down said to the kid “Son, I don’t know what is going on either. It must be an ice storm on the way. Are you folks getting another truck soon?” The clerk said in a very low voice “Sir, I think there are two coming at 2 a.m. I would wait here if I were  you.” With that information Tom slinked outside to his car and called his wife at home just before midnight to tell her he would be staying to wait on the WalMart trucks.

1730 ET…February 21, 2010

It was a typical Sunday night in my household, a tremendous dinner, nice weather in Florida and of course a chance to chat with my friends online about the events of the world. The big news was that on Friday, February 19, 2010 the US Dollar Index closed at 69.07 far below any level in history and of course shattering all known technical support. As I grabbed a glass of Port and settled in front of my computer at 5 p.m. Eastern to watch the Asian fireworks and watch Bloomberg and CNBC-Asia on my computer, I noticed the Middle Eastern markets closed in horrid shape. The Israeli market closed three hours after the open and down 22% for the session. The Saudi markets closed after one hour and down 41%.  Other regional markets did not open or were shut down due to national emergency declarations. As I tuned in expecting the usual repeat on Bloomberg, it was live with a somewhat excited news babe reading information from a blog reporting “rumors” that the CEO’s of Citigroup and Bank of America were in meetings since 11 a.m. with the New York Fed. At that point, it was time to put the port up and break out the hard stuff.

Gold had closed at a record high again, up some $37 to finish Friday’s session up at $1289 and change so I figured it would be jumping again with all of this worldly instability on display. I searched the boards and feeds like mad, looking for anything on an Iranian attack or outbreak of war elsewhere in the world but nothing was found at all. As 6 p.m. Eastern flipped up on my watch, CNBC interrupted their programming with a live update from New York instead of Australia or Tokyo about the meeting at the NY Fed. Bloomberg also broke from their Asian coverage with a brief story but no details as to why there was a meeting today or who else was there.  As the New Zealand markets opened, the prices went nuts but shockingly to the upside. Their markets shot up 11% on the open to break over the 3900 price level but that was not the story. As the futures opened in Chicago for the evening session, no matter where you were in the world that day or night, you printed that screen at 6:04 p.m. Eastern time as the prints were staggering:

Gold UP $212.15 to $1501.15

Silver UP $39.13 to $81.06

US DOLLAR INDEX DOWN 9.5869 or just over 14% to 59.4830

US S&P FUTURES DOWN 49.13

US DOW FUTURES DOWN 472

NASDAQ FUTURES DOWN 135

Holy Smokes!  This was an absurd way to start the night and my phone started ringing along with text messages and emails out my wazoo. The sense of panic was evident on Bernie Lo’s face as he came on to the air discussing what was happening in the futures market and fortunately he announced that Jim Rogers would be joining him after the next break. As the commercial started at 6:09 p.m. Eastern the scroll at the bottom of the screen was bright red with the headline:

ALL U.S. EQUITY FUTURES ARE LOCK LIMIT DOWN…..TRADING SUSPENDED UNTIL 0900 ET MONDAY FEB 22….US DOLLAR BEING SOLD ACROSS THE BOARD

By 6:15 the Euro was trading at $1.92, the Kiwi (New Zealand Dollar) at $1.26, the Aussie Dollar well beyond par at $1.39 and the Canadian Loonie rocketing past par to $1.33. The U.S. Dollar was in a full fledged collapse and the world was putting money anywhere they could to escape the carnage. As the New Zealand equity markets struggled to handle the order flow an announcement emerged at 6:27 p.m. Eastern time that they would no longer accept U.S. dollars within their nation for the next 72 hours until the United States Federal Reserve Bank introduced stability measures.  That instantly turned a huge move to the upside to down 17% in less than three minutes and soon thereafter, trading was suspended by 7 p.m. Eastern time.  Instead of waiting to see what was next, I left at 6:51 p.m. to run down the street and take $500 from the local grocery store ATM,  returning just in time for the top of the hour news.

1900 ET

The Australian markets attempted to open but due to order imbalances they were delayed twenty-seven minutes. It was a buying frenzy in Australia also as the Aussie Dollar was skyrocketing higher and gold continued to gain, now up $273.20 per ounce in less than two hours of trading. The Chicago board was going to make a statement at 8 p.m. ET and the world was holding its collective breath because something bad was happening again in the United States and everyone wanted to buy into foreign markets to escape the American disaster on the horizon. After a brief opening, the Australian government followed suit with the New Zealand announcement and suspended acceptance of the U.S. Dollar for commerce until further notice. The Japanese were very quiet in the mean time as they announced at 7 p.m. they would keep their markets closed but the huge move in the Yen caused massive concerns as noted by the central bank. The yen appreciated from a close of 79.8213 on Friday the 19th to an opening of 48.7326 in less than an hour of trading. Nobody wanted dollars and even fewer people it was discovered wanted the British Pound.  The Pound for the first time in its history was worth less than 100 yen and it was well on its way to joining the US Dollar in a death spiral.

2000 ET

The internet is crawling. Message boards were lit up with record numbers of participants. Rumors swirled about declarations of martial law, bank holidays, secret wars and other crazy things. Yet my phone messages, conversations, texts and emails told me there was something very very wrong. Two of my friends called me to tell me the consequences of the failed 30 year bond auction last Thursday came home to roost over the weekend. Citi and BoA were rumored to have a huge CDS obligation due to the interest rates being blown outside of the norm and the 6.05% yield from the auction cost the banks an estimated $400 billion each if  they were forced to settle open swap contracts and derivative issues by Monday or the end of the month. The swaps and derivatives which were to prevent the collapse may actually have finally started it but nobody could verify anything that was happening as the NY Fed looked like a war zone with hundreds of cameras around the building and reporters speculating endlessly on every cable channel.

2100 ET

I did not know who to believe but when Bloomberg played the excerpt from Jim Rogers’ interview just after the top of the hour where he said “this is what a currency collapse looks like and if you were not prepared, you were wiped out” really resonated with everyone on the Bloomberg set and throughout the news worldwide. The Chicago Futures were closed by order of the CFTC and SEC and that was the big announcement but it was assumed anyways because there was no way the COMEX or anyone else could possibly have kept up with the demand for precious metals as the last print had gold over $1579 per ounce and worse, the base metals closing at obscene prices like $6.79 per lb. for copper! The Shanghai markets were ordered open for domestic participants only and no overseas selling was allowed nor trading in US Dollars thus allowing the communists to manage their banking situation without outside influence. Unfortunately a rumor was confirmed on FNC later in the hour that Chinese troops were deployed to all U.S. and British bank branches inside their nation. That only permeated the panic already felt on the internet and in the air. The news at the top of the hour was even more shocking.

2200 ET

CNN led the hour off with coverage of the “FINANCIAL CRISIS OF 2010″ with breaking news about two hedge fund managers committing suicide in their offices in New York. That did not help the confidence level nor did the statement from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner at 10:09 p.m. Eastern that the “government was in full control of the situation and that the panic world wide was unwarranted.”  When he finished the statement assuring that the financial markets would probably open on time in the morning, the snicker from CNBC’s team of Gasparino and Griffith spoke volumes about what was really occurring.

2300 ET

Somehow a picture of Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein and JP Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon entering the New York Federal Reserve building was leaked out and broadcast on cable news and financial news outlets causing more discussions and a genuine sense of panic to grip everyone. Reports about credit cards not working for the last two hours nationwide were swamping the newsrooms but no comments from VISA, Master Charge or anyone else was forthcoming.

0000 ET February 22, 2010

It was officially a panic. Reports on local news stations about grocery store shelves being cleaned out and ATM machines running out of money hours ago and not being refilled were broadcast nationwide. Even my local station had a story about accessing the reporter’s bank account online and all they got was a very scary message as they attempted to reach his bank’s web page:

404-NOT FOUND

0100 ET

WWOR and WCBS started reporting that gas stations in the New York City and northern New Jersey areas were running out of gas even though credit cards did not work. The cable news stations and financial news networks just recycled earlier news with updates at the top of the hour. The world markets were closed and everyone was holding their breath to see what happened the next morning.

0200 ET

As I struggled to stay awake, NY Federal Reserve President Denis Hughes came to the microphones with Dimon, Blankfein and shockingly Ben Bernanke. Hughes immediately deferred to Bernanke who said that the President would address the nation at 7 a.m. Eastern Time and that he felt the crisis was averted for the moment and that everyone should have faith in the United State’s policy of a strong currency and banking system. After that statement was concluded, Bloomberg switched to a banking analyst from Singapore who said that the U.S. was now a hulking smoking black hole in the ground and the only thing it was good for was to return those worthless dollars back to “THAT” nation so “THEY” could burn them to stay warm this winter.

0300 ET

Someone on the message board posted a story from WTOP that military police were seen setting up roadblocks throughout Washington, D.C.  There was no video or other confirmation within that hour. I had to make double strength coffee at that point in time but instead set my alarm for 0500 to try to grab a nap. I was not about to miss what was going to be a day to remember in American history.

0509 ET

So sue me! I hit my snooze button then realized I fell asleep with the computer and television on and the news was flying. In big bold red at the top of CNBC’s screen was the announcement COUNTDOWN TO SPEECH and a counter moving towards 0700 Eastern. As I flipped the channels half awake, I noticed a BREAKING NEWS announcement on CNN and there was a feed from WSB in Atlanta, GA with their helicopter video of the Georgia State Patrol closing off all streets within three blocks of the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta and also around the Federal Home Loan Bank. That sent a chill down my spine as I flipped back on to the computer to see over two hundred unread emails and message upon message about shortages, internet outages, credit card problems and worst of all, gas stations running out of fuel. The other shocker was the suspension of international flights in many U.S. cities as the suppliers put every airline on C.O.D. effective immediately at 2:30 a.m. Eastern Time and that suspended a ton of flights inside the United States and worldwide. The cascading effects were stunning, even to those of us who were warning about it.

0530 ET

Several European markets attempted to open in coordination with Middle Eastern markets but the declines were so severe that within ten minutes of trading the authorities shut them all down within a half hour:

Russia -35%

Saudi Arabia -43%

Israel -22%

Switzerland -17%

Germany’s DAX -41%

CAC 40 – 29%

FTSE 100 – 32%

The Euro was up another 10% against the dollar and the Swiss Franc was now worth over $1.40 U.S. As the discussions about the problems with the U.S. dollar accelerated, banks were being shut down in Europe in nation after nation to prevent runs. Sadly for the Brits, the Sterling was now trading so poorly in Europe that it was worth just 1/3 of a Euro at some trading desks. By the top of the hour, video of riots in front of banks in Frankfurt and Glasgow were broadcast nationwide.  At 5:55 a.m. Eastern the news took a dark turn with this BREAKING NEWS headline:

OBAMA AND BERNANKE TO SPEAK TO THE NATION AT 6 A.M. EST

0600 ET

The speech was low key, solemn and to the point. Obama announced a one week bank holiday. All credit card transactions and all collection actions of any sort were hereby suspended for seven days.  All financial markets were closed until further notice.  All mortgage and bill payment due dates were suspended for thirty days and no past due notices nor penalties were to be allowed by Federal Law. All schools were closed for seventy-two hours be they public or private.  The city of Washington, D.C. was hereby declared to be under a state of martial law and all citizens were ordered to observe a curfew from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. daily. Just as that sunk in, Ben Bernanke stepped up to the microphone to announce that President Obama, Treasury Secretary Geithner and all of the Federal Reserve Presidents along with himself were going to depart for Geneva for an emergency meeting of the G-20, IMF, World Bank and United Nations Financial Stability Working Group.  Bernanke also announced that Citigroup, N.A. and Bank of America were hereby nationalized and placed under control of the United States Treasury under the auspices of the FDIC and that Sheila Bair would have an announcement at 8 a.m. Eastern. As he finished the announcement, an obviously exhausted Federal Reserve Chairman concluded by assuring the citizens of the nation that a stable currency was their only goal from this meeting of world financial leaders. I noted he did not say what currency though he was referring to.

0800 ET

By now, CNBC, Fox Business and Bloomberg were knee deep in wall to wall coverage but so were the broadcast and cable networks. America was on the brink was the preaching and screaming and the “bulls” were being gored by the permabears every time they uttered any statements about “how we’ve been through worse” etc., etc.

The announcement of the seizure by the FDIC of two of the largest banks in the world was pretty standard and short. The follow up statement by Ms. Barr though is what caused every newsroom to take pause when she stated that “further consolidations will be announced in the next seventy-two hours.”

The Bubblemedia was stunned and even shocked when Canada announced that they would attempt to open their financial markets for two hours of trading and that their banks would be open for normal domestic customers and business from 10 a.m. until noon Eastern time.  Everyone on television looked at each other and just asked “How?”

0900 ET

I had forgotten to call in sick to work but then again the phone call from the company owner was pretty much a “well now what” as we laughed in a gallows humor discussion. He understood why I was home and he had already told the employees that he was closing at noon and would reopen when we could actually collect real money on what we sold and leased out. I told him I would call him at home later or meet him with a bottle on the golf course in the morning, weather permitting.

The chilling video of the Federal Reserve heads, Geithner and Obama boarding Air Force One to leave for Geneva from Washington, D.C. really had an impact on me.

1000 ET

The Canadian markets opened up 10% in ten minutes then rolled over down 31% by 10:30. The scary part was that the Canadian dollar kept on rising even though commodity trading was suspended and everyone was wondering just what gold would be priced at if the markets were allowed to trade.

As the day wore on, it was a blur of shocking story after shocking story. The President and his entourage arrived in Switzerland along with other world leaders but little was discussed or disclosed. The reports of banks being fire bombed by nuts throughout parts of the U.S. made the international news and caused all of us to feel somewhat uncomfortable as to what was next. The 8 p.m. interruption of normal prime time programming with a FEMA NEWS ALERT which lasted ten minutes and was repeated at the top of every hour with little if any information caused even more panic in the masses. Today I watched our dollar die in a matter of hours even though I knew how it was killed months if not years ago. I just wondered how bad the announcement out of Geneva was going to be as our bankers and politicians sold our souls out to save their rear ends.

I also wondered if I would ever sleep again.

The Day the Dollar Died by John Galt by John Galt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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