With a superheated economy, there was no way for the government to check the soaring inflation, aside from stopping the presses. This they could not do, however, because depositors were still flocking to the banks to withdraw all of their savings. The workers who still had jobs quickly caught on to the full implications of the mass inflation. They insisted on daily inflation indexing of their salaries, and in some cases even insisted on being paid daily.
Citizens on fixed incomes were wiped out financially by the hyperinflation within two weeks. These included pensioners, those on unemployment insurance, and welfare recipients. Few could afford to buy a can of beans when it cost $150. The riots started soon after inflation bolted past the 1,000 percent mark. Detroit, New York City, and Los Angeles were the first cities to see full-scale rioting and looting. Soon the riots engulfed most other large cities including Houston, San Antonio, Chicago, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Jose, San Diego, Dallas, Indianapolis, and Memphis.
It was when the Dow Jones average had slumped its first 1,900 points that Lars Laine decided to stock up. But by then it was nearly too late. Gas cans had all been snapped up a week before. The shelves at the supermarkets were already being cleaned out. Unable to find extra batteries at department stores, Lars and Beth started looking elsewhere. They finally found some that had been overlooked at a Toys “R” Us store. They were able to find a few first-aid supplies, but those, too, were being rapidly depleted, along with everything else at the local CVS drugstore. The local gun shops had been completely cleaned out of inventory. There wasn’t a single gun or box of ammunition left for sale.
At night, after the stores closed, Lars and Beth stayed up late, ordering things like batteries, lightbulbs, Celox wound coagulant, mason jar lids, and gun cleaning equipment from Internet vendors and from individual sellers on eBay. They placed multiple orders, realizing that in the scarcity of the new market paradigm, at least half of these orders would never arrive.
To their dismay, they found that the Internet ammunition vendors had completely run out of ammunition and extra magazines. After much searching, Lars did manage to order a spare firing pin, a spare extractor, and a few stripper clips for the pair of Finnish-made M39 Mosin-Nagant rifles that he and his brother had inherited from their father.
As the local stores began to run out, there were fewer and fewer things that Lars and Lisbeth could buy. Beth suggested buying extra blue jeans and tube socks, to trade, but they found that the clothing store shelves had already been decimated. Realizing that their money was rapidly becoming worthless, they resorted to buying motion-sensor yard floodlights, plumbing parts, sheets of plywood, and two-by-four studs at the local building store, just as something that they could later barter. A week later, even those were unavailable. It was like a huge nationwide fire sale in progress. Everyone wanted out of dollars and into tangibles. But it soon became abundantly clear that there were too many dollars and too few useful tangibles available. Prices could only go one way: up.
The local banks were overwhelmed with cash withdrawals and soon got into the pattern of having their cash supply wiped out each morning, and then renewed each night, as local merchants made their deposits. Their transaction volume soared, but their deposit accounts quickly dwindled to below regulation levels. The queue of customers outside the bank each morning soon became the inspiration for jokes and jeering. “They have to print fresh money each night” became the standard joke.
Lars was thankful that he had a three-hundred-gallon aboveground tank of gasoline at the ranch, and that it was nearly full when the economic crisis set in. He added a padlock to it, but he was worried that someone might try to steal the gas at gunpoint.
Both in Bloomfield and the much larger city of Farmington just a few miles west, many of the retail businesses that remained open were cleaned out, leaving the owners with piles of increasingly worthless greenbacks. Eventually, even the local gift store ran out of inventory. People had become so desperate to get rid of their dollars that they traded them for New Mexico logo T-shirts and coffee mugs made for the tourist trade.
3. The Crunch
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation then by deflation, the banks and the corporations will grow up around them, will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”
Pain. That was his most vivid memory of the past two years. It had started with a fairly routine convoy of five up-armored Humvees in the old quarter of An Najaf. His last memory of that drive was of sitting in the sweltering backseat of the Humvee, looking down at a map and gripping a SINCGARS radio handset. Captain Lars Laine had been in liaison with his Afghanistan National Army (ANA) counterpart, discussing the planned locations of a couple of random checkpoints for the next day. The .50 gunner standing above him yelled “Possible device, left!”-a warning that he had spotted a suspicious object that might be an improvised explosive device. Then he saw a flash and heard a loud explosion.
The next thing that Lars remembered was waking up in a field hospital, trying to focus his vision. And no sooner did he realize that he was in a hospital than he passed out again.
He awoke again twenty-eight hours later, more than three thousand miles away, at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, with his head throbbing. He asked in an almost unintelligible voice, “Can you take the edge off this pain?” He vaguely remembered the face of the E-6 male nurse who stood by his bedside. The nurse obliged with a fresh dose of Demerol IV via his Luer-Lock intravenous fluid connector.
The nurse gave Lars some water on a sponge stick that looked like a lollipop. It was as Lars was getting these first dribbles of water that he realized that he had no vision in his left eye. Several hours later he further realized that the vestiges of his left eye had been removed from its orbit and replaced by a nitrile rubber and gauze packing, supplemented with a drainage tube.
Losing his eye put Lars into a brief depression. But then seeing much more badly wounded soldiers around him made him count his blessings. As he later told Beth: “At least I’m walking around on two good legs. Every day aboveground is a gift from God.”
Lars gradually regained some awareness of his surroundings. A male nurse walked up to his bed and handed him a cup of water with a straw. The nurse held the cup while Lars took a couple of clumsy sips.
Lars nodded and said, “Thanks, that’s better.”
The nurse put the glass down within reach on Laine’s bed table and said, “You were delirious. The first time I gave you water on a sponge stick, you tried to eat the sponge. Oh, and you kept repeating some phrases; I think they were Pashto or Arabic.”
“Such as?”
“Two of them that I remember are ‘Wayne riff attack’ and ‘Erf-e-dack.” What language was that?”
Lars thought for a moment and answered, “That was Arabic. Uhhh, well, ‘Wayn rifakak’ means ‘We are your friends’ and ‘Irfa’a eedak’ is an order-it means ‘Put your hands up!’”