Shoes Dropping


By : James Howard Kunstler


     The fall of Britain's Northern Rock bank may be the first dropped shoe in a chorus line of big banks tap-dancing into oblivion. The British government's move yesterday to nationalize the insolvent mortgage lender's remaining operations leaves shareholders holding an empty bag. Their only resort now will be to call their lawyers. What we may be witnessing, in a movement that will surely spread to the US, is a changing of the guard at the top of the financial food-chain between bankers and lawyers.


      Shoes may have begun to drop in the US last week with Citigroup halting redemptions for its $500-million CSO mini hedge fund -- half a billion dollars being something less than walking-around-money in the Hamptons these days. Halting redemptions means that investors in the fund cannot withdraw their money -- the same as going to the bank and being told your account is frozen. Hedge funds can play rough with their investors because they are unregulated. The reason they remain unregulated is the presumption that anybody rich enough to "play" in a hedge fund can afford to lose (or be swindled) with no protection on the sidelines from government busybodies. What's more, the hedge fund managers do not have to make any of their operations open to public view, so that neither the investors nor any regulating authority knows what they are actually doing.

     What the big banks who run many hedge funds are doing is going broke. They are pretending to be solvent by borrowing money from the Federal Reserve, the nation's alleged superbank. But borrowed money is not capital, i.e. surplus wealth wholly owned. Borrowed money is an obligation, a liability, a negative on the balance sheet. You can't have an entire financial system based on nothing more than a giant daisy-chain of liabilities. Somewhere there has to be a "reserve" of assets, items of value owned by somebody.

      Through most of modern times, assets have been denoted by cash money. A given bank will hold in "reserve" say $10 billion in money that is not owed to anybody, allowing them to do things like pay depositors who show up at the window needing money for groceries. Up until a few decades ago, nations held an ultimate reserve of actual gold in a vault (Fort Knox, Kentucky, in the case of the USA) and the physical possession of this gold was said to "back up" the value of the certificates that circulated as a "medium-of-exchange" or currency.

      But that system was considered too awkward and "reserves" were then denoted in just currencies themselves, or certificates that represented the existence of currencies held elsewhere, or pixels on a screen representing the movement of alleged piles of currency from one place to another, or the intention to move a notional pile of currency to a theoretical destination, and then that became an algorithm purporting to represent the future arrival of a notional pile of money at theoretical destination to-be-named-later, and so on.... And after another while, the nature of money became so detached from anything real, so abstract, that its very existence became hypothetical. Even this "worked" for a while, in terms of the managers of this money being able to "cream" substantial amounts of this hypothetical money off the top of their notional operations and translate that hypothetical cream into Tribeca lofts, Gulfstream jets, and other real luxuries.

     The rest of the economic food chain -- and the social order that represented it -- got stripped of remaining asset value (and social value) until they had nothing left to trade with except debt, in one form or another, and this phase of the game turned out to have a short lifetime when the the only debts remaining to be monetized were the contracts on houses occupied by people with no hope of ever meeting their obligations -- and then the whole sorry racket started to go up in a vapor.

     This is roughly where we are, and where the banks stand today. They are pretending to have money and desperately cadging loans from all comers to keep appearances up, but the loans can't come in fast enough. The appearance of confidence is crucial (as it is, of course, in any "con" game) to keep the investors (depositors) at bay. If a bunch of investors (depositors) all got nervous about the solvency of a given bank, they might try to slip in there during business hours and withdraw or redeem their "money" and perhaps translate it into items of value like gold coins, bottles of vodka, or cases of 9 millimeter pistol ammunition. And if enough of this bunch showed up at the same time, we would see a phenomenon called a "run" on a bank. And after that started at one bank, the thing Franklin Roosevelt called "fear itself" could easily spread to depositors in other banks pretending to be okay... and that would be the magic moment that the USA discovered it was no longer a rich nation.

     That would be a very rude awakening. The whole world would know about it in about thirty seconds, and the rest of the world would be in a lot of trouble, too, since so much of its notional wealth is represented by piles of US dollars (or certificates denoting them). Then what you could see is a run by other nations (investor-depositors) on the United States of America as a whole, or an awkward global receivership process, in which all remaining assets were stripped -- including maybe even some of those Tribeca lofts and Gulfstream jets.

     Of course, the rest of the world would have a hard time getting any of this stuff out, or fencing it off at a discount. Rather, they'd probably just eat their losses and quarantine themselves off from the world's new financial-and-economic leper. They'd stop sending us Toyota Highlanders, plastic salad shooters, and, oh yes, oil. We'd be left with a lot of empty big box stores, vacant highways, and houses inconveniently deployed too far from any place of utility. One thing we'd have plenty of, though, is home-grown pissed-off people. Some of them may even be lawyers.

 

Note: my novel about America's post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is now shipping to booksellers everywhere.  Get one. You'll like it.

James Howard Kunstler has worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis.

His latest nonfiction book, "The Long Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the 21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil, military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food.