Chapter 6

 

 

 

All this was happening across the nation and Atlanta was right up there with the other hard hit cities.  This had started out to be a black protest thing and Atlanta had a very large black population.  When the rioting started here the looting soon affected a very large number of businesses in many areas of the city.  After all you could not keep looting the same store so the rioters would move to different streets or different areas of the city just about every night it seemed. 

Everyone had cell phones and I think these were used for wide spread and rapid communications between the rioters.  Police whereabouts were reported and the rioters would always seem to be a street or two away from the main police presence.  One or two police units were no match for a hundred or more quickly forming rioters and looters.

Luckily for me the convenience store where I worked was more on the edge of the city.  So far none of the riots or even the protests had ever come anywhere close to here at all.  Everything was several miles from this location.  But like many other places the rioting here kept getting worse and worse.  Again this did not really directly effect me in any way at least until things got so bad the National Guard was called out and put in place here in Atlanta just like in other cities.

When the mayor here had the National Guard to back him up he called for a curfew.  As soon as the curfew went into effect I was out of a job.  Of course I was not fired or anything.  I just was more like on furlough or temporarily laid off.  I was assured that when the curfew was lifted I would be working the same hours as I was now or I should say I had been working.   

America was not the only country having trouble.  All of Europe was getting deeper into financial trouble.  When Greece defaulted the Euro had fallen and still was way down.  The Euro was worth way less than the dollar now and that was hurting the European Union countries substantially. 

Then in the same day a rocket shot down an airliner in France and also one in England.  ISIS claimed responsibility for those actions and stated that was just the beginning as they were now ready to attack the west on their own soil.  A week later another airliner went down in Spain and international air travel while still moving was dramatically reduced with everyone afraid to be on an airplane.

The huge loss in tourist dollars had an immediate effect on the incomes of many countries that were already just hanging on by a thread.  Most greatly depended on this tourist money as a major source of their income and the loss of this income had a ripple effect in many areas.  The result was even more financial hardships for the countries and their citizens, both of which were already about at the end of their financial ropes.  Several countries that had received loans to just stay afloat defaulted on those loans.  This had an immediate effect across most of the world markets including the US markets. 

The DOW fell dramatically like it had in the past after any major terrorist attack.  This time it was a double whammy of both terrorist attacks and the other countries economic failures.  The market fell after the terrorists hit those planes then as it slowly started to creep up again the financial woes of several of the European counties pushed the stock market back down and changed the trend from slowly rising to steadily falling.

With the default in now several European countries several big banks in the United States admitted that they had been heavily invested in those countries that were now in default.  These too big to fail banks looked to Congress again for a bail out to keep them afloat.  There were closed door sessions and meetings in the Capital building and the result was no bailout like last time.  But the banks were not left high and dry.  The citizens of the United States learned a couple of new terms, bail-in and hair-cut.

Everyone with money in these major banks took a major hair-cut because the banks basically took the money out of Savings Accounts, Checking Accounts, Certificates of Deposit, Money Market Accounts, and any other cash deposits.  Supposedly these depositors were compensated for these deposits by receiving bank shares in place of the cash.  Of course these shares were basically worthless but it helped justify the seizure of the cash.  The cash seizures were limited to a sliding percentage of each depositors account balance.  The more money you had the more the bank took from you.  If you had less than one thousand dollars your money was not touched.  Amounts over one thousand had some money removed from the account on a sliding scale.

Congress then did act and temporarily froze all retirement accounts across the country.  With the falling stock market many people had seen the writing on the wall and had started closing out their IRA’s, 401k’s, and other retirement accounts which for the most part were all invested in the stock markets with some also in the bond markets (which they realized were really no safer than stocks).  That stopped when our government froze all those retirement accounts.  Capital controls were not instituted because the banks had already taken most of everyone’s money out of all the cash accounts.

The US stock markets were closed with no time given as to when they would be reopened.  America’s whole economy started grinding to a halt.  The protests and riots that had been about black lives and police brutality now were bolstered by a whole new group of people.  People who had lost their money to the banks or had their pension funds frozen by our government joined those protesters.  The loss of the cash in the banks caused many small businesses to close immediately.  They could not buy supplies or pay their employees so they had no choice but to close their doors. 

Even large businesses either had to cut way back or close down.  Huge numbers of people found themselves out of work and whatever savings they had stolen by the banks or frozen by their government.  The closing of businesses did not happen overnight (like the bank bail-in had done) but did happen pretty rapidly.  People were left bewildered and angry.  And they became very angry protesters. 

In a sense this did bring the country together.  The protests now had blacks and whites protesting side by side with a common enemy- the government.