Thanks for scar­ing me to death…  Not real­ly…

Back in Jan­u­ary of 2010 The Sur­vival­Mom pub­lished a post on “The One-Hour Melt­down.”  I actu­al­ly came across this last week for the first time.  Not sure how I missed it, but, in trolling her blog, it popped up.  She’s right to be scared of this, espe­cial­ly in this econ­o­my.   Espe­cial­ly if these sce­nar­ios are real.  If you have not read it yet, you can read the orig­i­nal sto­ry at The One-Hour Melt­down by click­ing on the link.  It out­lines what would hap­pen in a bank­ing sys­tem shut­down…

This is of par­tic­u­lar con­cern to me because I have no cash stored in my home, with the excep­tion of my change jar that gets unloaded at the change bin at the bank pret­ty reg­u­lar­ly, so there is nev­er a lot of change in it.  If the bank­ing sys­tem were to shut down, I would be SOL because I also do not have any sil­ver or gold coins at home that might be able to be used for barter or as cur­ren­cy.

It is my opin­ion that those with cash on hand would con­tin­ue using it to the point they deplet­ed it, or real­ized the bank­ing sys­tem would not go live again any­time soon, mak­ing the cur­ren­cy worth­less… Barter and loot­ing would take over.  After about four days, most homes would be with­out food.  With no hard cur­ren­cy to process trans­ac­tions, (wire trans­fers, ACH, ATMs, etc. would be use­less, loot­ed, etc.) there would be no fuel con­sump­tion.  No fuel con­sump­tion means no deliv­er­ies.  No deliv­er­ies, means no food.  Nada. For no one.

I won­der how long it would take the pow­er com­pa­nies and oth­er util­i­ties to shut down oper­a­tions and serv­ing cus­tomers if the bank­ing sys­tem went down.  I mean, this was the goal of Al Qae­da on 9/11.  Shut­ting down our finan­cial sys­tem for six days was a suc­cess to them, even though it did not have the intend­ed result that Bin Laden was look­ing for.

Bank­ing Hol­i­days also pose anoth­er per­son­al threat, because of the Patri­ot Act signed by Pres­i­dent George W. Bush with regard to safe deposit box­es.  Grant­ed, the rules are writ­ten to cov­er ter­ror­ism, but it is so broad, it cov­ers you as well.  Here are a cou­ple of resources:

Con­clu­sion, I am going to start keep­ing more cash on hand I think.  Time to make anoth­er plan…

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