Currency

by L. Todd Wood

  Everyone on board was killed instantly due to the forces involved. That was the only consolation.

 

 

  Chapter Eighteen

  New York

  The Russian president confidently mounted the podium at the United Nations. The chamber was silent and the members waited patiently. They expected an important speech. At least that was what was billed. He paused as his hands gripped the side of the podium and looked out at the audience for effect. He resembled a Southern preacher ready to deliver God’s judgment to his congregation.

  “Mr. President of the General Assembly of the United Nations, Mr. Secretary-General of the United Nations, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,” he began as he paid his respects to the officials present. Although fluent in English, he spoke in Russian.

  “The Russian Federation has long felt that we were playing on an unfair playing field regarding trade. One of the reasons is that most international trade is conducted in United States Dollars. I am here to announce that Russia has joined with other great nations to replace the U.S. Dollar as the global reserve and trading currency. We, in conjunction with our partners, are establishing a new global currency that will be based on a basket of sovereign currencies. Russia, China, and others will no longer use the U.S. Dollar for trade payments.”

  There was a low murmur among the members of the chamber. Then someone started clapping. Then the chamber for the most part erupted in applause. The members of the United Nations had long been anti-American, even as America paid twenty-five percent of her dues. The American delegation as well as her remaining allies got up from their seats and walked out of the chamber. They had expected as much of a declaration.

  He continued, “For too long, the United States has enjoyed lower interest rates and an irrationally high currency valuation. This has resulted in a higher standard of living, due to the demand that a reserve currency creates. This will now end. The United States will have to compete with the rest of the world for capital on an equal footing.”

  The Russians had brought up this single world currency idea six years ago, but now the issue was a reality, at least for part of the world. Since the USD would no longer be used as a global reserve currency by many nations, there would not be so much demand for the dollar. Therefore the United States would have to pay higher interest rates to attract buyers of its debt. Again, the United States debt situation was completely out of control and this rise in rates unsustainable. But of course, this was entirely the plan.

  From the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, the global currency was the Spanish piece of eight, based on precious metals. Then the Spanish empire decayed from within. The empire’s many wars depleted her treasury even after the trillions of gold and silver brought back to her shores.

  As the British Empire flourished, the world shifted to the pound sterling. London became the financial capital of the world. This lasted until the end of World War II. Fighting the Nazi war machine was a financial mountain too great to climb, even after the Marshall Plan.

  Once the British began to lose their empire after that great global conflict, the world shifted to the United States Dollar as the global reserve currency. The impact of British debt from the world wars caused the sterling to weaken and hurried along the process. They simply could no longer afford their empire or protect it. The Bretton Woods Conference at the end of World War II established the USD as the global trading currency, one that was based on a link to gold. When President Nixon took the U.S. Dollar off the gold standard in the early seventies, the USD became a fiat global reserve currency.

  Russia and China had set up a system of expanding the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, Special Drawing Rights (SDR) and based the new currency on a basket of world currencies, which included the USD. This, however, was no help in reducing the extremely negative impact of this development on the United States and its ability to survive as an economic power.

  The Russian president spoke with a smile on his face.

  Gold hit a new high on global markets.

  September 14, 1836

  Port Richmond, New Jersey

  He knew it was coming. He welcomed it. In fact, he yearned for it. He could feel the change happening within his body, the organs shutting down. He hoped he would like what was in store for him. But he didn’t care; he just wanted it to happen. The pain here was too great. Today was the day. He knew it.

  Theodosia was gone. His wife had left him. He was disgraced. That was the pain he could not bear, that his country lost faith in him. The country he had helped birth. The country he had fought for.

  The clergy had stopped coming. He was thankful for that. They had been trying to redeem his soul. His soul didn’t need redeeming in his mind. It was all a bunch of hogwash. What he needed was to be left alone.

  He was bitter, a misanthrope. It felt good to him, to hold the bitterness. It was what kept him alive the last few years.

  Aaron Burr lay in his bed. Earlier in the day he picked up one of the letters strewn around the room from his many women. The author was special to him. He remembered her touch, the way she captivated him. He missed her. He hadn’t seen her for years. Her jealous husband had seen to that. But oh, she was so beautiful in his memory.

  One of many.

  He hadn’t left this room in the boarding house for weeks now. It was his deathbed. That he knew.

  How he hated the human race. His life should have turned out so differently.

  But alas, it was not to be.

  He was penniless. He was alone. He was dying.

  The irony was that today his divorce was final. The woman who was so fond of him, until he had spent half her fortune on bad land deals was no longer to be his wife. An extremely wealthy widow, Eliza Jumel loved him but could not be with him. She even nursed him through sickness after she left him but would never be with him again.

  The women all ran together. They loved him but in the end left him. It was his burden. Even his beloved Theodosia had left him. She had been shipwrecked, never to be seen again. He wanted to be with her once more. He wanted to hear her laughter and see her charming face light up with happiness. Burr loved her more than anything in his life and longed to be by her side as he remembered. He hoped he would be when this was over.

  He looked around the room again. It somehow looked distant. The caretaker of the boardinghouse was now by his bedside.

  But he didn’t see her. He only saw the angels.

  He let go.

 

  After the word leaked out of the house that Burr had passed, a well-dressed young man, who had been hanging around the boarding house and who everyone thought was family, stole his way up into Burr’s room and quickly made a plaster cast of Burr’s face. It was his death mask and was to be shown throughout the centuries to come.

  Connor didn’t realize how tired he was until he stepped out of the tilt rotor onto the deck of the aircraft carrier after the hit on the yacht. The weather was calm, and the ship moved quietly through the dark ocean, a silent, moving island. The sound and vibration were like a cat purring in the night. He was always amazed how massive these vessels were, a self-contained city unto themselves.

  His eyes were long adjusted to the darkness, as he was on night vision goggles the whole mission. His legs were weary and he felt drained as never before. He easily made his way to the stairway leading to the bowels of the ship. The adrenaline had left his body, and the let down made him feel weak after the long, sustained rush of excitement. All of a sudden he was very, very tired. He held on to the railings of the stairs for dear life.

  Before entering the passageway, he again looked up at the stars overhead and thought of Kate. He longed to see her. He had not realized how much. His step quickened, she should be already down below. His energy partially returned with the thought of her. A surge of happiness passed through him.
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br />   He made his way to the ready room to hear the debrief of the mission. On the whole as far as he could tell, it was a smashing success. Their objectives had been achieved. The ship was secured and the precious cargo recovered. This included Kate, the data from the computers on board, as well as live prisoners to interrogate and learn more. He stood taller as these thoughts passed through his head.

  As he made his way through the myriad of tunnels on board the ship to his destination, he curiously noted a somber look on many of the officers’ faces. He had expected a different reaction. They refused to lock eyes with him. Soon Connor rounded the corner to the ready room.

  The captain of the carrier met him at the entrance. “Follow me, Mr. Murray,” he directed. Connor did as he was told.

  They left the ready room and made their way to a small briefing area, one of many for flight crews to prepare individually before their missions. The captain shut the door behind them. The look on his face was grim.

  “Connor, I don’t know any other way to say this except to just say it.” He paused briefly, then continued. “Kate is dead.” He let that phrase hang in the air as Connor absorbed its meaning.

  “The aircraft in which she was being ferried crashed. There were no survivors.”

  Connor laughed. He had known this before. It was a dream. Okay, I can wake up now, he thought. But nothing changed. This was reality and he knew it. It had happened a second time.

  “Not again,” he said aloud.

  His son screamed at him, “Help me Daddy!”

  Emily screamed, “Connor I’m burning!”

  But Kate was foremost in his mind.

  “Be strong, my love,” he heard her say.

  Connor buried his head in his arms and wept.

  Washington, D.C.

  Langley, Virginia

  The analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency pored over the treasure trove of documents and data from the raids on Nevis and the yacht. An army of men and women had every resource at their disposal to glean immediate and detailed information from the intelligence captured.

  The objective was to acquire the information needed before the markets opened the following Monday. The president did not want to lose his strategic advantage here, so the pressure was on. The task force worked around the clock, decoding computer drives and deciphering reams of paper records.

  The main items of interest were the CUSIPs of U.S. treasury bonds owned by the alliance, now considered the enemy. CUSIP stands for Committee on Uniform Securities Identification Procedures. Every North American financial security can be uniquely identified by an alphanumeric string of characters. This was part of the intelligence recovered from the yacht and from the raid on Nevis.

  The United States could be virtually certain who owned each U.S. security at any time based on ownership of the CUSIPs. In other words, the U.S. could identify the owners of its debt piece by piece.

  Records of ownership of all bonds outstanding were compiled by the economic task force assembled by the president. With this corroborating data, the team was close to being one hundred percent sure which bonds were owned by the alliance. The ownership was of course layered through multiple offshore accounts and shell companies, all controlled by the member countries themselves.

  This and other information was also confirmed by coerced interrogation of prisoners taken from the yacht. The interrogators did not have a lot of time to acquire the information the president needed. This included confirmation of the alliance’s economic objectives against the United States and their methods to accomplish these. The interrogations worked and the information was delivered to Washington.

  The president could now act with certain knowledge against his enemies.

  Oval Office

  President Walker signed the orders at his desk. The entire National Security Staff was there to witness the act. The actions authorized were very dangerous and carried with them many risks. However, so did making acts of war against the United States of America, no matter her weakened condition.

  Weakness is risk, the president thought as he attached his signature to the documents. We will no longer be weak, at least while I am president. He took no pleasure in these actions, but he also decided he had no choice but to show determination to the world. It was his job to decide if he put America’s young men and women in harm’s way. He remembered the famous words of Ronald Reagan, “Peace through strength.”

  The initial orders he signed pre-deployed forces throughout the world to forward locations so that they would be in position to execute any mission given them. These included naval, air, and ground assets.

  He then called the leaders of Congress and invited them to the White House to brief them on the situation. This was required by the War Powers Act. The president had to inform Congress forty-eight hours prior to initiating hostilities with the United States military.

  Even though no president considered the limits on presidential power by the War Powers Act valid, they usually complied with the notification requirement.

  He asked them to prepare a declaration of war against the members of the alliance and to hold it at bay until his request.

  The Chinese military buildup had been reaching a crescendo for years now. They had begun to deploy multiple aircraft carriers in the Pacific Ocean in their quest to achieve a blue water navy, one that could be effective worldwide in any body of water. They were threatening their neighbors. In fact, they were threatening the world.

  The Pacific was an American lake for decades, since the fall of the Soviet Union. China was intent on changing that.

  They resented United States warships being deployed off their coast to bully and intimidate. They especially resented U.S. support of Taiwan. This was their country. How dare another power try to tell them what to do concerning this island.

  China also believed they had discovered a way to maintain power as well as make their population happy. They would allow them to become capitalist─up to a point. Allowing them to become wealthy was a way to keep the Communist Party in power. It was very obvious that central planning did not work. Not even the communists believed in that system anymore. They knew that individuals could allocate capital much more efficiently than any government committee could.

  But they were sure to maintain the tentacles of power. Any prospect of unrest or a threat to the power of the Communist Party was swiftly and brutally put down. They did not want any repeat of the Tiananmen Square disaster that happened in the late twentieth century.

  So they quietly built up their military. They persistently stole technology through cyber attacks against Pentagon and civilian contractor systems. They manipulated their currency by keeping it artificially low, which allowed their goods to be cheaper than Western counterparts. This fueled a large trade imbalance and built up their foreign currency reserves with which they bought United States treasury bonds. They were the banker to the United States, funding the creation of a vast welfare state in the U.S. that was unsustainable.

  Now they held all the cards, or at least enough of them. At least they thought they did.

  The question was, which system would win out in the end? Would the boot on the neck of the Chinese people eventually produce significant opposition? Would the people give up political freedom forever in return for limited economic freedom? Or would an economic downturn produce enough frustration that the system could be changed? Or perhaps frustration with the environmental and human rights abuses would do the job.

  In any event, China had now forced a confrontation with the United States. This in all likelihood would force all of these questions to the forefront. The United States would finally have to deal with Chinese aggression, and the Chinese people would maybe be forced to decide what type of government they wanted to live under.

  Moscow

  Natasha was scared. She had been living a lie for years now. One thing was clear to
her. She was a cat with nine lives on her ninth chance. They were on to her. She was convinced of it. There were too many coincidences. Small items in her apartment moved, people following her, faces she saw over and over again in random places.

  Yes, they were on to her.

  She had to get out. Her handler was right. It was time.

  But how?

  That remained to be seen. They will come up with something, she told herself. She tried to stop herself from panicking.

  For now she waited. She did her job as the assistant to the Russian president. Of course this job had many obligations. Any Russian girl would realize that. And the president was very demanding, downright ravenous, when it came to her. She performed her duties well.

  She was from a small village three hours drive from Moscow, another world from Moscow. Moscow was not really Russia. Life in the village was simple. At the age of seventeen, she was plucked from the countryside to become a model in the city. She was incredibly beautiful. After that her life changed dramatically. That was ten years ago.

  She traveled the world. She learned about other countries and other people. She graduated from one of the best universities in Moscow. She was cultured now. She had seen for herself which type of governments worked and which did not.

  She was everything the president was looking for. After the relationship started, she was contacted by an old modeling friend. She had been turned.

  It wasn’t that difficult. She had experienced real freedom abroad in other countries. She had seen real democracy. After many late night conversations with this girl, who happened to work for the Americans, she decided to help.

  She was a good listener when not attending to her duties. She passed this all on to the Americans.