Jack of Harts

It began with a whimper, not a bang. A Friday afternoon announcement that the United States of America would no longer make payments on the debt to China a few other select nations that did not have America’s best interests at heart. It was part of the traditional weekend infodump on the networks that included a line item about reducing funding to a few cherished political third rail programs. The networks did report on it, and many analysts of the time said that was the most dangerous part of the entire infodump. But there was far more outrage about the suggestion that the government would limit grandmother’s social security payments than whether or not they would pay some Chinese banker on the other side of the world. It is amazing how an event so important can be utterly invisible to the people of the time. That Friday was another Archduke Ferdinand moment for our world. It was a day few noticed at the time but that started the irreversible tumble into the abyss that was The Second Great Depression.