A C
ONTEMPORANEOUS
A
CCOUNT OF THE
E
CO
-E
CONOMIC
C
RISIS OF
2037
Ashir Al-Hasan
AUGUST 15, 2037
Abstract: I’ve never recorded anything for the sake of posterity, but that is the position in which I now find myself. There is a very real possibility the nation will see widespread breakdown of a functioning, governable society in the coming months, and it may be that the only contribution I have left to make is this unvarnished account. Even in the grip of this unfolding chaos, history demands primary source documentation, and I believe I carry as much responsibility as anyone for our failure to arrest this crisis.
Following the hasty invasion and military occupation of Pakistan last September, there were rumors President Love’s cabinet would remove him. As a scientist with the Global Change Research Program, I was at the far periphery of events, yet due to my close relationship with Texas representative Tracy Aamanzaihou, I was privy to disturbing news emanating from the White House: The president had stopped speaking to his advisors and refused to leave the residence. Congresswoman Aamanzaihou was furious:
“The whole donor class and Democratic Party infrastructure twisted my arm to drop out, even when they knew he was losing it. And now we’re all going to pay.”
Due to voting irregularities, disputes, and suspect rulings from the Supreme Court, no candidate collected the necessary 270 electoral votes, and therefore the decision fell to the House of Representatives, using the procedure spelled out in the Constitution in which each state delegation has one vote and a candidate must garner at least twenty-six votes. By this arcane arithmetic there would be enough Republican votes in a majority of states to place The Pastor in the White House. However, in the weeks leading up to this vote, a series of banking and insurance failures threw the economy into turmoil. The stock market plunged, foreclosures and unemployment spiked, and credit tightened. When the Treasury secretary and the chairman of the Federal Reserve improvised deals to save several insurers and a major bank holding company, The Pastor employed his typical approach of populist fury to make clear he would let any and all financial institutions collapse before he allowed the rise of American socialism. As my sister, Haniya, put it:
“We dodged this guy not because he was a fascist promising to incinerate nonbelievers in a hail of nuclear hellfire but because Wall Street got spooked they wouldn’t get their bonuses.”
In the end, Republican majority leader Russ Mackowski brokered a deal with the Democratic caucus: If the Democrats would agree to his terms, he could get his allies to deadlock the vote so that no candidate would have the requisite twenty-six votes, and then the Senate could vote for the vice presidential candidate, who would serve as acting president. The Pastor’s camp howled about this maneuver, but Warren Hamby, an unknown and previously unremarked-upon two-term congressman from Orange County, California, who was grafted to The Pastor’s ticket only to allay fears of the firebrand, was essentially installed as president of the United States. After a vicious election, this was a jarring but relieving development. Markets rose initially, only to topple again when Hamby gave an inauguration speech from the Oval Office. He had to pause several times to loudly swallow his own spit.
Congresswoman Aamanzaihou asked me to prepare a white paper on the nature of the crisis and what might be done to avert catastrophe. I obliged, spending sixteen frenzied days researching and writing. During this time, a funeral was held for the activist Kate Morris. Wrapped in a shroud, her body would go to provide the nutrients to a young redwood tree in an Oregon forest. Most channels were streaming the ceremony live, well-attended as it was by numerous celebrities, politicians, and activists, and I set aside my work to listen to the speech by Holly Pietrus, daughter of my colleague. My great animosity toward Kate Morris for the role she’d played in Seth’s death had persisted even after the news that she and twelve others had been gunned down. With her eulogy, Holly helped to dissipate it. She finished with a quote from Gabriel García Márquez:
“If I knew that this would be the last time I would hear your voice, I’d take hold of each word to be able to hear it over and over again. If I knew this was the last time I’d see you, I’d tell you I love you, and would not just assume foolishly you know it already.”
My acquaintance Matt Stanton was not in attendance, but I thought of how he must have felt watching the grotesque revelry of Morris’s opponents at her horrific end. I thought of our frequent powwows over slushies in the summer of ’29. How little we knew then about what the ensuing decade would bring. Suddenly, I felt a deep and deserved shame at my petty indifference to Morris’s death. How foolish we can all be, indeed.
By the time I turned in the white paper draft to the congresswoman in May, unemployment had reached 19.3 percent. Prevarication by Hamby and Congress had allowed the crisis to expand. Thirteen days later, on May 20, after blocking President Hamby’s choice for Treasury secretary, Majority Leader Mackowski acquiesced and allowed the confirmation of Martin Rathbone, a longtime Democratic economist who’d begun his career in Treasury during the 2007–08 crisis, returned briefly for the Randall administration, and resigned as Loren Victor Love’s head of the National Economic Council after the siege of Washington.
On May 25, I got a call from the office of Alice McCowen, requesting my presence at 1500 Pennsylvania Ave, the Treasury Building. I’d been pleased to see her announced as Warren Hamby’s chief of staff. For all Alice’s flaws, she is not stupid and she is not scared of much—two traits that would be very useful in a panic of this magnitude.
With dozens of top positions still requiring Senate confirmation, the Treasury Building felt like an empty warehouse. The district had gone into preemptive lockdown in January as protests and violence broke out in other cities around the country. Capitol Police and National Guard manned checkpoints on every street. We met not in the secretary’s office but in a marginal workspace the size of a large closet. Alice exuded her typical bombastic energy, while Secretary Rathbone came to the meeting in sweat-stained workout clothes, chugging thirstily from a water bottle. A towering, handsome, meagerly intelligent man, I’ve always thought Rathbone to be arrogance incarnate, yet now he looked deeply perturbed. He began by making light of his appointment:
“Clearly, Russ Mack only let me through so he could kick the shit out of me. I’ll tell you, Ash, you think our trip around the world to look at famine was dark. Wait’ll you see the industrial production indicators.”
Alice said: “The good news is that Congress and Wall Street are out of options. The world’s burning, and they’re going to have to start accepting whatever enema we tell them to jam up there.”
“Do you speak for the president?” I asked her.
“The president? Don’t make me laugh. Hamby is a president like I’m a fucking astrophysicist. He’s terrified. Sold his soul to get on The Pastor’s ticket, and now he wants to hide under the table.”
Rathbone said: “We have a road map. Bailouts and stress tests like we did in ’09. We let no systemically important institution fail. Then we hit this fucker with stimulus that will make the Covid-19 packages look like Austrian economics.”