Meanwhile flying was still much reduced, except for an increase in battery-powered short flights, and an immense surge in airship construction. Ocean trade was disrupted; millions were out of work; millions were in the streets. Online, people were joining YourLock and abandoning the other social media sites, now called the predatory social media. So many people were withdrawing their savings from private banks and depositing them in credit unions and alternative cooperative financial institutions that another financial crash not only was happening but was the deepest in over a century. The banks had all been so over-leveraged for so long that what that actually meant had been lost; so now, in a crisis as big as this one, most of them had been brought to their knees, and were stumping to their governments’ central banks to squeal for salvation. This time the governments’ treasuries, although still in the hands of financial industry veterans, found they could do nothing like what they had done in the 2008 bail-out; that crash was looking minor compared to this one, and because of the 2020 recession, awareness of what was happening, and why, was much higher. It was a different time, a new structure of feeling, a new material situation. Already people were saying this was bigger than 2020, bigger than the Great Depression, maybe the biggest economic crash ever— because it wasn’t just economic. The whole damn merry-go-round had spun off its flywheel and was disintegrating as it fell.
So Mary called up the heads of the various central banks around the world and got them to agree to gather to talk things over yet again. Many of them wanted her to come to them, and she almost agreed to hold the meeting in Beijing: the Chinese would be key to any solution. But the Chinese were punctilious about joining international meetings, and would go anywhere the meeting was held, she judged; they didn’t care so much about national prestige that they would refuse to join a settlement being worked out elsewhere. The puffy nation in that regard would be the United States, but Mary was pretty sure Jane Yablonski would also come to the meeting wherever it was. And the Bank for International Settlements’ annual meeting in Basel was coming up soon anyway. So she told them to please come to Zurich too, right after the BIS meeting. Air travel being now so fraught, specially arranged stealth military flights would bring them all to Switzerland; or now, quite a few would fly in on airships.
Hosting a meeting of a dozen or twenty of the most powerful people on Earth, which meant also accommodating large staffs for each of them, was a big job, but one that the Swiss were used to performing. For this meeting there were too many people for the ministry offices to hold, so they held the meeting in the Kongresshall, down by the lake.
The morning they convened, the broad picture windows spanning the south wall of the big room provided them with the pathetic fallacy in full measure: a spring storm lashed the Zurichsee, with low shifting gray clouds dropping black brooms of rain onto the silvery lake surface, the windows running wild with deltas of rainwater kaleidoscoping this view. Nothing unusual in that, no LA-like climate apocalypse here, just Zurich spring weather as usual; but still very fitting, given the mood in the room, which was one of grim virtue. They would weather this storm, they said to each other while looking out at it, and all the stark emotion in the room was heightened by the dark metallic sublimity of the rain-lashed whitecaps on the lake, the sound of the wind ripping through the flailing trees.
Mary brought them to order. She reminded them of the meetings she had had with them over the past few years, in which she had urged them to create a new currency of their own collaboration, based on carbon sequestration, and exchangeable on currency exchanges; money like other money, but backed by the central banks working together, and securitized by the creation of really long-term bonds, bonds with a century pay-out at a guaranteed rate of return large enough to tempt anyone interested in fiscal stability. In essence, as she had been saying, creating a way to invest in survival, to go long on civilization, as opposed to the many ingenious ways that finance had found to short civilization, thus in the process shifting most of the surplus value created in the last four decades to the richest two percent of the population, making those few so rich that they could imagine surviving the crash of civilization, they and their descendants living on into some poorly imagined gated-community post-apocalypse in which servants and food and fuel and games would still be available to them. No way, she said to the bankers; not a chance that would happen. Shorting civilization and imagining living on in some fortress island of the mind was another fantasy of escape, one of many that rich people entertained, as ridiculous as retreating to Mars. Money was worthless if there was no civilization to back it, no civilization to make things to buy— things like food. So even if the central bankers were regarding their task in the very narrowest terms, as stabilizing prices and helping the employment rate, and more than anything else, preserving the perceived value of money itself— to do that now, they had to leave their usual monetarist silos, and regard themselves as what they
